A group of five Information Technology students from Aalborg University have developed a new file system, which they hope can replace the company.s central fileserver.

Christened Heurika, the system is a distributed file sharing system, where the files are placed on ordinary office computers in the network instead of on a central server.

This strategy offers advantages with regard to the use of the network and it also reduces the risk of losing data. The reason for these advantages is that the same file is placed on more than one computer.

No problem
However, this means that a file of for example 10MB will eventually take up 40 MB of the file system's capacity, but according to the students this is not a great problem.

- Disc space for clients is considerably cheaper than disc space for servers. In addition there is a certain surplus of disc space on office computers, which may contain a 100GB disk of which you only use 20 GB for programs, says Jasper K. Juhl, one of the five students behind the file system.

The basic structure in the file system is designed in such a way that the network is better employed than in systems based on a central file server and with existing distributed file systems such as for example the p2p-networks E-Donkey and Overnet.

- The scaling is good in our file system and as opposed to systems like E-Donkey and Overnet, you can read as well as write to the files, says Jasper K. Juhl.

In a simulated network the system is tested to perform with 160 Mbit/s in a 10 Mbit/s network with 100 Mbit/s backbone.

Distributed File Server
The fact that the performance is above what the network seems to be able to provide at first sight is due to the circumstance that the file server is distributed across the entire network.

Because the files are distributed across many machines, the file system can service several clients at the same time in different segments of the network.

Of course this does not go for cases where there is only one client who collects one file. The individual client remains delimited by the network.s capacity of 10 Mbit/s.

Clients on the same switch in the network are in the same way delimited by the theoretical maximum speed of 100 Mbit/s on the backbone.

However, from a unified perspective many clients on different switches will be able to achieve the higher speed. The reason is that they can collect from other computers on the same switch without so to speak being an obstacle to the other clients in the network

A central file server would normally be linked directly to the backbone, thereby delimiting the performance to 100 Mbit/s.

First the Exam - then the Product
Right now the five students are busy studying for their exams. However, the project has not been shelved, even if the project report has been handed in. It passed with praise from the adjudicator. According to Jasper K. Juhl, they will continue to develop the system.

- I am quite certain that we will do that. It depends on which subjects we shall study. However, there are such great perspectives in this project, that I would not be surprised if a product will emerge in a few years time, whether it be open source or a commercial item, he says.

In time Jasper K. Juhl hopes that Heurika will be able to take over from file sharing systems such as Windows file sharing and SMB as the preferred way to share files in a network.

This article was originally written in Danish and has been translated by the independent "Danish English" translation service. Please visit www.Danish-English.com for more information about this agency.

The original article can be found at Computerworld Online at
http://www.computerworld.dk/art/22157