Redundant Array of Independent Clouds

Redundant Array of Independent Networked Storage or RAINS would sound so much cooler considering it is "cloud" storage.

Cool! First thoughts:<p>* how many of the supported options boil down to Amazon S3?<p>* is this the new "upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it"? <a href="https://groups.google.com/group/linux.dev.kernel/msg/76ae734d543e396d?pli=1" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/group/linux.dev.kernel/msg/76ae734...</a><p>* whoever put together this newsletter is clearly doing a great job for that community

Nice idea! This paper (<a href="http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~hweather/publications/racs-socc2010.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~hweather/publications/racs-socc20...</a>) called RACS from Cornell explored the same space about two years ago, but it's really nice to see it rendered to practice in usable filesystem form.

Even before "cloud" or online storage was too hot or even showed up yet, I was thinking of doing this.<p>Time was Google providing "unlimited" gmail storage and fuse gmail-fs was just released. I looked for another fuse fs like a hotmail-fs but did not push hard on it. I could not find and let my idea die.<p>It was hard to do and time consuming, but marginal gain would be small. Also I'm a f<i></i><i></i> lazy system administrator. I hate coding :)

See screenshots: <a href="http://www.sickness.it/crazycloudexperiment1.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.sickness.it/crazycloudexperiment1.png</a> and <a href="http://www.sickness.it/crazycloudexperiment2.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.sickness.it/crazycloudexperiment2.png</a> from Diego "sickness" Righi's notes: <a href="http://www.sickness.it/crazycloudexperiment.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.sickness.it/crazycloudexperiment.txt</a>

I;m sure many of thought of this, nice to see someone do it.<p>My idea for backup would use something like DIBS ( <a href="http://www.mit.edu/~emin/source_code/dibs/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mit.edu/~emin/source_code/dibs/</a>) but instead of peers, use many free salami slice sizes of storage from cloud/hosting platforms.

Sidekick: Why am I not surprised that he replaced <i>inexpensive</i> with <i>independent</i> in the original acronym...<p>Other than that, interesting project.

Memopal does not use Amazon S3. Memopal is based on the Memopal Global File System (MGFS), the archiving technology created and used by Memopal. MGFS is a distributed file system, designed to be highly reliable, scalable and at the lowest cost per Gb possible. read more <a href="http://www.memopal.com/en/technology.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.memopal.com/en/technology.htm</a>

nice work zooko et al :)<p>my understanding is that tahoe-lafs is meant to be used as a live filesystem. how does the redundancy configuration affect latency? i would guess a cloned volume ("RAID 1") would be faster than a distributed volume (e.g. "RAID 5" or "RAID 6").

the idea of using multiple independent free providers as a unified one it's something that could be very popular among some of my friends, if someone could slap a nice UI on it I believe there would be a good market for it.

Beowulf cluster?