LizardFS: Open-Source Distributed File System
An open-source distributed file system designed for large storage environments, offering redundancy and scalability through chunking and commodity hardware distribution.
What is LizardFS?
LizardFS is an open-source distributed file system designed for very large storage environments that need to scale to handle exponentially growing amounts of unstructured data. It is optimized to store big data such as multimedia files, VM images, Docker containers, log files, and more.
Some key capabilities and benefits of LizardFS include:
- Automatic file replication and self-healing - Files are split into chunks and copies of each chunk are stored on multiple drives to protect against hardware failures.
- Software-defined scalability - You can scale storage capacity and performance linearly and limitlessly by adding more commodity servers or hard drives.
- Geo-replication - Supports creating geo-distributed deployments across multiple data centers for data locality and protection against site failures.
- Optimized for big files - Its architecture delivers high throughput for large files and media streaming workloads.
- Cost-effective - LizardFS minimizes hardware costs by leveraging any commodity server and drive combinations rather than expensive, proprietary storage.
With its decentralized design, limitless scalability, and hardware cost efficiency, LizardFS is well-suited for building massive yet affordable storage for unstructured data at petabyte scale and beyond.