Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems

Home of the Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems mailing list, also known as BlueSky.

Charter

Many groups are now exploring the development of scalable, decentralized file systems, such as OceanStore, FreeHaven, Freenet, and MojoNation. They are better characterized as serverless or peer to peer than the strictly client / server organization of traditional systems. The challenges of extreme decentralization and very large scale are new and difficult while real experience is hard to come by. While existing projects and proposed systems have divergent goals and strategies, they face many common problems and can learn from each others prototypes. It would benefit everyone to have a forum for clarifying goals, sharing new ideas, soliciting feedback and getting help with problems. Ideally, the discussion would help solidify this new field, eventually leading to some agreement on a taxonomy of goals, problems and solutions. A mailing list focused on technical issues and steering clear of fuzzier topics, more like coderpunks than cypherpunks, could provide such a service. A list dedicated to the exchange of ideas *between* these groups would supplement the multitude of existing project-specific discussions and enrich them all.

The charter of the Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems mailing list is:

The purpose of the mailing list is to foster discussion of design and implementation issues related to the development of scalable, decentralized storage systems of literally global scope. The emphasis should be on technical descriptions and critique of mechanisms providing efficiency, reliability, security, and similar properties. Discussion of goals and semantics is also desirable, while acknowledging that a diversity of systems will be built and evaluated. Messages with primarily political, legal or philosophical content are discouraged.

Administrivia

This mailing list is hosted by ibiblio using Mailman software. Here is the webpage for subscriptions and member may email submissions to bluesky@lists.ibiblio.org.

The list was formerly hosted at franklin.oit.unc.edu. The subscriber information was transferred to the new host on Monday 18-November-2002 and there should be no interruption in service.

Non-members can view the archive on ibiblio or at mail-archive (the latter appears to be incomplete).

References

Various folks have provided references to material that would be of interest to some participants. Some of them are collected here with a bit of annotation.
Global-Scale Distributed Storage Systems <bluesky@lists.ibiblio.org>
Last modified: Tue Apr 15 08:13:41 Eastern Daylight Time 2003