[Vinzvault] announcement of the vinzvault project

CCing openais and linux-cluster ml since there may be some cluster developers interested in participating in this project there. I am pleased to announce we are starting a new project called vinzvault to help resolve some of the difficulties in deploying virtual machines in data-centers. There are other projects that use similar technology or have similar goals as ours. The Ceph filesystem provides a cloud file-system for large scale machines to use as storage. Hail provides a S3 API for accessing information. Cassandra provides a distributed database using techniques similar to what we are planning to provide eventually consistent replicated bigtable style databases. Our project is focused around one goal: providing a small footprint (10kloc) highly available block storage area for virtual machines optimized for Linux data-centers. Our plans don't depend on SAN hardware, software, hardware fencing devices, or any other hardware then is commonly available on commodity hardware. We intend to trade these lower-scale high cost technologies for higher-scale lower cost techniques. Some of our requirements: * Easy to use, deploy, and manage. * 100,000 host count scalability. * Only depend on commodity hardware systems. * Migration works seamlessly within a datacenter without SAN hardware. * VM block images can be replicated to N where N is configurable per VM image. * VM block images can be replicated to various data centers. * Low latency block storage access for all VMs. * Tuneable block sizes per VM. * Use standard network mechanisms to transmit blocks to the various replicas. * Avoid multicast. * Ensure only authorized host machines may connect to the vinzvault storage areas. * No central metadata server - everything is 100% distributed. We plan to execute this project using an overlay DHT hash table called D1HT(1). The 1 in D1HT indicates there is, in a majority of cases, only 1 network request/response required per block of storage. Like all solutions that trade performance for scale/cost, our project may not meet your deployment needs, but we aim to focus on correctness first and performance second. We hope readers will participate in the development of this LGPL/GPL open source project. Our mailing list is vinzvault(a)fedorahosted.org. One final note - no code is in our repo yet - that is for developers interested in this technology to make happen (this is a from scratch implementation). Lets get cracking! Regards -steve (1) http://www.cos.ufrj.br/~monnerat/D1HT_paper.html