Blog @ Digital Bazaar

February 26, 2007 on 10:34 am | In Corporate, Development, Industry, Starfish | Comments Off

We tried to find a company that could scale as large as we wanted at an affordable cost. Cluster File Systems had the best solution, but at the end of the day it didn’t fix our biggest problem – which was sad – CFS is a fantastic company run by great people. They have a great product, it just wasn’t a good fit for what we needed. All the other companies that we looked at were ridiculously expensive – we were beating them 10-to-1 on cost.

So, we sat down, scratched our heads for a while – spent months planning and building a truly scalable storage system and we couldn’t be happier with the results. We call it Starfish – a massive, highly-available, fault-tolerant file system that is capable of automatically providing file mirroring, disaster recovery, and high-availability in the event of multiple storage or metadata node failures.

What does that mean in regular human-speak? Well, like the starfish, this filesystem can be damaged severely, continue to function, and regrow itself over time.

Best of all – we’re releasing it to the world – free for use for up to 1 Terabyte of storage. We’ll post something in the next month or so making the official announcement – we just wanted everybody to know that it’s coming and it means big things for the storage solutions industry and anybody that has to store a large amount of data for long periods of time.