Wuala - P2P Online Storage Cloud
How do you design a reliable distributed file system when the expected availability of the individual nodes are only ~1/5? That is the case for P2P systems. Dominik Grolimund, the founder of a Swiss startup Caleido will show you how! They have launched Wuala, the social online storage service which scales as new nodes join the P2P network.
The goal of Wua.la is to provide distributed online storage that is:
- large
- scalable
- reliable
- secure
by harnessing the idle resources of participating computers.
This challenge is an old dream of computer science. In fact as Andrew Tanenbaum wrote in 1995:
"The design of a world-wide, fully transparent distributed filesystem fot simultaneous use by millions of mobile and frequently disconnected users is left as an exercise for the reader"
After three years of research and development at at ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology on a distributed storage system, Caleido is ready to unveil the result: Wuala. Wuala is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet. It enables its users to trade parts of their local storage for online storage and it allows us to provide a better service for free. In this Google Tech Talk, Dominik will explain what Wuala is and how it works, and he will also show a demo.
The availability problem is solved by redundancy (just like in Google File System). However simple replication techniques would result in too much overhead because of the low availability of the nodes. Instead Wuala employs erasure coding and splits the data into small pieces. Optimal erasure codes produce n/r fragments where any n fragments is sufficient to recover the original message. These pieces are then distributed in the P2P network providing good availability at a reasonable overhead.
The P2P network consists of client, storage and routing nodes. The Wuala architecture uses a mix of regular and random graphs to optimize routing.
Dominik also explains how Wuala architecture is designed to provide security and fairness.
Wuala employs the 128 bit AES algorithm for encryption and the 2048 bit RSA algorithm for authentication. If you're interested in how Wuala manages encryption, have a look at their publication on Cryptree. They have also implemented distributed reputation audit and maintenance functions.
Check out the Tech Talk! It is worth the time!
