SwarmFS is a lightweight protocol converter that seamlessly integrates Swarm scale-out object storage with NFS v4. It combines Swarm's universal, multi-protocol namespace with the power of enhanced and custom metadata, offering you new ways to manage, view, and analyze your data. SwarmFS provides a traditional file interface to Swarm object storage for content generators (enterprises, researchers, web-based applications, and developers) who use native NFS-based applications to create, access, and manage that content while allowing for the same content to be created, accessed, and managed through modern cloud and object APIs such as S3 and SCSP.
SwarmFS avoids the common problems of traditional gateway and connector file-based storage solutions: protocol and storage silos, bottlenecks, and single points of failure. SwarmFS with Swarm object storage provides, as standard, high availability (HA), data management (from creation to expiration), powerful metadata management, and ad hoc search to your content.
Key features
- Universal namespace — eliminates protocol silos by enabling every object to be written/accessed via NFSv4, S3, or SCSP/HTTP, all without restriction
- Lightweight for rapid deployment (VM or physical)
- Built-in active/active HA, no clustering required or limitations on number of active access points
- Direct access to read and update an object's metadata over NFS
- Stateless — reducing data loss of uncommitted resources
- Data is read from and written directly to Swarm, which means no latency and risk of data loss introduced through staging data, as with traditional gateways and connectors
- Leverages Swarm’s built-in distributed features for resilience and HA
Benefits
| Productivity | Store, access, and manage files |
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| Less Risk | Security and scale with no single point of failure |
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| Lower TCO | Leverage Swarm scale-out storage |
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SwarmFS gives you true distributed file management, with the self-healing modularity of clusters that can have resources come online and go in and out of service with no disruption to user experience:
Simplified Architecture
SwarmFS is a lightweight nfs-ganesha plugin, which is simple to both install and manage. A traditional gateway or connector has many more moving parts, each adding restrictions, overhead, and complexity:
High Availability
SwarmFS is stateless, which means that you can spin up as many SwarmFS instances as needed and all NFS instances are active, with no failover or clustering required. With SwarmFS, HA is simple and part of the standard product: no special configuration/clustering or management required.
Traditional gateways and connectors must stage objects as files locally on the gateway, which means that you are limited by disk space on gateway server. SwarmFS does not cache or stage files/objects on local disk space; rather, it streams data directly to and from Swarm. You escape the performance overhead of writing complete objects to a local gateway staging disk, and you have no risk of losing data if the Gateway crashes before data is spooled off the gateway to the object store.
Note
Given the stateless nature of Swarm and SwarmFS, file locking exists only within a single SwarmFS server.
Simplified Security
POSIX — SwarmFS adds basic POSIX security to the modern object security inherent in Swarm. This is important as it means that you achieve uniform object security through and across NFS, SCSP, and S3, with additional POSIX file security when objects are accessed though SwarmFS.
Access Control — SwarmFS supports basic POSIX UNIX-style ACLs (user, group, other); object access control is managed via Content Gateway. SwarmFS validates the login/password, and it then leaves Gateway to control object access. Native Swarm access means Anonymous NFS access to objects only.