Mimer

Background:

The way that hard drive technology is developing, storage is growing rapidly while cost/storage is decreasing. This means that commodity computers have far more storage than is required at no additional cost. Commodity computers are dropping in price making it possible for users to use more than one computer in their weekly activities. This change in usage patterns drives users to demand access to their files independently of the computer that they are using. Processors are becoming more powerful and more parallel while disk read speeds have seen nominal increase. This comes at the same time that we are seeing network speeds, even for wireless networks grow above old limits. The growth of the network speed has made it possible for a network to be faster than a disk.

Problem Statement:

In the modern Information Technology world reliable, large scale storage is a primary concern. Current solutions such as Storage area networks and Network attached storage increase in complexity as more computers are connected to them, and as storage demands increase. However many business and education Information Technology departments have lots of free storage on the computers they provide for use by employees or students. However this storage is fragmented and needs to be pooled together so that it can be useful. This pool must also be reliable and reliability comes at a cost of storage overhead. Minimizing this overhead while allowing for a good worst case scenario on drive and computer failure can be complex or slow. This has caused some solutions to be delegated to backup storage only and not for real-time access of data. Also there are security issues in sharing this storage since it is not behind one gateway or secure by any physical access means extra work must be done to ensure that third parties can not get unauthorized access.

Team Members:

CS - Ryan McGovern mcgoverp(at)email.uc.edu
CS Chris Siebertsieberca(at)email.uc.edu
etc.

Faculty Advisor:

Fred S. Annexstein

Goal:

To create a distributed file storage and retrieval system.

Subgoals:

1. For the system to be-able to withstand 50% or more node failures.
2. For system to use a total of four times the size of the file for storage.

Helpful Skills:

• Remote file storatge
• File systems
• Redundant network systems
• Network programming
• Application programming interfaces
• Erasure codes
• Data encoding
• Norse mythology