Storage System Research Center. We are investigating the construction of large-scale storage systems using object-based storage devices (OSDs). An OSD is a network-attached storage device that presents an interface of arbitrarily-named data objects of variable size rather than sequentially numbered fixed-size blocks, to deal with the data storage details, such as request scheduling and data layout.
Abstract
This document specifies Pairtree, a filesystem hierarchy for holding objects that are located within that
hierarchy by mapping identifier strings to object directory (or folder) paths two characters at a time. If
an object directory (folder) holds all the files, and nothing but the files, that comprise the object, a
"pairtree" can be imported by a system that knows nothing about the nature or structure of the
objects but can still deliver any object's files by requested identifier.
The libferris virtual filesystem presents both files and their metadata as a virtual filesystem. The boundaries of what is considered a filesystem by libferris include such interesting data sources as PostgreSQL, LDAP and Firefox as well as standard Web items, such as HTTP, FTP and RDF.
S. Ghemawat, H. Gobioff, and S. Leung. Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles, page 29--43. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2003)