Is there open source Cloud File System available?

Question

A cloud file system is required for my current project(a cloud FTP exactly).

Are there any open source implementations available? If yes, could you please give me some reference. If there is some technical report related to the implementation, that couldn't be better :)

Since I haven't find one, I'm thinking about implementing one from scratch. Then still a problem occurs me: similar to local file systems, the concept of block is better introduced as basic storage unit, I think, to reduce overhead of small object transmission on the Internet. Then how to make a compromise between transmission cost and the cloud storage usage, given disk usage will drop dramatically if the block size is too large in local fs scenario? How large should I set the block size?

I turned to a senior for the above trade-off, who gave advice that variable block size can be employed. Then I'm curious about why classical file system like minix or ext3 don't take this strategy(correct me if I make a mistake)?

Answer 1

S3 is available How can I create an Amazon S3 clone on my host?

also ubuntu has the ability to cloud a bunch of computers and setup a distributed file system. http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud

are you trying to primarily prevent data loss or increase download speed?

How much hardware do you have?

have you looked at ZFS as a filesystem? It's interesting but I've never set it up.