iX prepares a p2p product

iX, the new name of iXsystems, the maker of TrueNAS and clearly a leader in open source storage, has started an initiative around p2p storage. The team shared the idea during the June IT Press Tour and the main idea is to avoid public cloud storage with an approach that considers only storage space from contributors i.e from users of the product. Having myself started a similar project in 2009, named KerStor, I'm a true believer of this model. As of today we count at least 20 projects, initiatives or products in the same domain.

The iX solution is for the moment named GDS for Global Distributed Storage, a very generic name, that should be changed when the product will be introduced. The company mentioned that this product is based on a partnership so probably a technology from one of thee 20 product instances. It will be a meta service layer on top of TrueNAS SCALE as each of this TrueNAS instance will serve as a member ora storage node in the product jargon, client and server, of the large private cloud built from all participating instances.

Data are exposed from this layer as a S3 resource, and the solution projects a 11 9s durability level thanks to a global erasure coding mechanism. All data transfers are secured with a AES-256 encryption algorithm. We'll provide more information when iX will be ready to share more details especially around the technology they picked.