Our lab has just released its NASD (Network Attached Secure Disk) code to the public under a BSD-style license. I mention it here because I think some of the folks doing filesystem and storage research under Linux might be interested. The NASD is a suggestion for what next-generation network storage might look like. The NASD drive exports a simple object-based interface over the network, provides cryptographic security for data access, and manages all of its own physical storage, but it does not make any policy decisions or implement any sort of filesystem. Higher-level filesystem decisions are made by a file manager, which performs access checks, ensures filesystem integrity, and provides synchronization, but is not on the data path between the NASD drive and clients -- clients receive NASD object IDs and cryptographic capabilities from the file manager and then access the objects directly from the drive. This allows filesystems with arbitrarily complex semantics to be built without the scaling and bottleneck problems that conventional fileservers have. We envision that future commodity disks may implement a standardized version of the NASD interface in firmware. Our current distribution includes a software implementation of the NASD drive prototype that runs in both kernel-space and userland in Linux 2.2 and Digital UNIX 3.2, as well as in userland under Solaris and IRIX. There is also a preliminary example filesystem, EDRFS, which has a client for Linux 2.2 and Digital UNIX 3.2, as well as a file manager for all of the platforms that the drive runs on. Additionally, the distribution contains client libraries and utilities for Linux, Digital Unix, Solaris, IRIX, and FreeBSD. more formal press release: The NASD (Network Attached Secure Disk) code from the Parallel Data Lab at Carnegie Mellon University is now available for download from http://www.pdl.cs.cmu.edu/extreme/distrib.html The NASD (Network Attached Secure Disks) storage system architecture exhibits direct client-drive data transfer in a networked environment using an object based interface, asynchronous oversight by the high level filesystem, cryptographic support for the integrity of requests, storage self management opportunities, and the ability to extend the feature set of NASD to demanding client applications without requiring modification of file manager software. Updates/changes made: For more information on NASD, please go to http://www.pdl.cs.cmu.edu/NASD/ NASD features include: - NASD drive software prototype - NASD security - EDRFS file system, including file manager and client - Prototype of Cheops aggregate storage manager - Utilities and tests for the NASD drive and EDRFS filesystem. More advanced tools will be available with future releases. - Drive and EDRFS executable as user process or loadable kernel module (LKM) for Linux 2.2 - Either TCP-based RPC (SRPC - included in this release) or DCE-RPC for communication - Portable code base. Currently the code has been ported to Linux/x86, Digital Unix, Solaris, IRIX, and a client-only port to FreeBSD. There are also full ports underway to Linux/ARM and Linux/Alpha. A mailing list for users of this software to share experiences and discussion exists. To subscribe to this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To contact recipients of this list, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Bulk mailings and advertisements are strictly prohibited. --nat -- nat lanza --------------------- research programmer, parallel data lab, cmu scs [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------------- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~magus/ there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths -- alfred north whitehead
