[FreeBSD-Announce] HAST Project Announcement

[Deb Goodkin]

Dear FreeBSD Community,

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce a new funded project!

Pawel Jakub Dawidek has been awarded a grant to implement storage
replication software that will enable users to use the FreeBSD operating
system for highly available configurations where data has to be shared
across the cluster nodes. The project is partly being funded by OMCnet
Internet Service (GmbH www.omc.net) and TransIP BV (www.transip.nl).

The software will allow for synchronous block-level replication of any
storage media (GEOM providers, using FreeBSD nomenclature) over the
TCP/IP network and for fast failure recovery. HAST will provide storage
using GEOM infrastructure, which means it will be file system and
application independent and could be combined with any existing GEOM
class. In case of a master node failure, the cluster will be able to
switch to the slave node, check and mount UFS file system or import ZFS
pool and continue to work without missing a single bit of data.

"High-availability is the number one requirement for any serious use of
any operating system," said Pawel Jakub Dawidek, FreeBSD Developer.
"Highly available storage is one of the key components in such
environments. I strongly believe there are many FreeBSD users that have
been waiting a long time for this functionality. I'll do my best to
deliver software that matches FreeBSD quality and that will satisfy the
needs of our users."

Pawel has been an active FreeBSD committer since 2003. During this
period, he has touched almost every part of the kernel. But, his main
interest in FreeBSD is storage and security related topics. Pawel is the
author of various GEOM classes (eli, mirror, gate, label, journal, hsec,
etc.), geom(8) utility, various opencrypto improvements as well as port
of the ZFS file system from OpenSolaris to FreeBSD.

The project will complete by February 2010.

Sincerely,

The FreeBSD Foundation