Polish distributed storage player MooseFS is upgrading its product set to reach more customers, but appears to be quite happy to stay relatively small – at least for now – to maintain a “work/life balance”.
Moose File System (MooseFS) is a POSIX-compliant distributed file system, aiming to be a “fault-tolerant, highly available, highly performing” scalable general-purpose network for data centers.
Initially solely proprietary software, an open source version was released to the public in 2008, and is available under the GPLv2 license. Alternatively, for more demanding customers, MooseFS Professional Edition (MooseFS Pro) is available under a proprietary license.
At an IT Press Tour in Istanbul, Blocks & Files and other press and analysts were told the two products shared 98 percent of the same code, with 2 percent secret sauce in the Pro version giving it the edge in serving the wider needs of bigger and more varied workloads.
The file system comprises three components. A metadata server manages the location of files, file access and namespace hierarchy. Clients only talk to this server to retrieve and update a file’s layout and attributes. The data itself is transferred directly between clients and chunk servers (see below).
A metalogger server can optionally be used to periodically pull the metadata from the metadata server to store it for backup. Variable numbers of chunk servers are used to store the data and optionally replicate it among themselves.
As MooseFS allows parallel read/write access across multiple storage nodes, it “eliminates” bottlenecks caused by a single central server or network connection, or so the sales pitch states. Customers can extend your storage up to 16 exabytes, accommodating more than 2 billion files in a single cluster, we are told. And automated monitoring and “self-repair” algorithms allow staff to shift away from micromanagement.
Version 4.0 of the Pro version of the software was launched in 2019, to also serve block storage needs and support erasure coding. And now, version 4 of the open source offering is being made available this autumn, to help get more customers to try out the software, and generate more sales for the provider. The upgraded version offers basic erasure coding support, improved tiering, and a new GUI, and it will be available on GitHub.
Customers may either buy support services around the free version, or convert to the Pro version, which comes with a one-time license fee with no subscription charges for a certain storage cluster capacity. The Pro license cost increases when initial data capacity increases. Customers, of course, may well buy support services around Pro too.
Headquartered in Warsaw, the company offers global support from there. Blocks & Files asked about scaling up the company. Jakub Ratajczak, CEO of MooseFS, said: “When it comes to growing the company, we believe in a work/life balance, and are not seeking investment from angels etc.”
Asked about current annual sales figures, Ratajczak, after some prodding, eventually disclosed that the firm is generating a modest €2 million annually.
He said: “We are profitable and believe our customer base will keep growing, and have just taken on dedicated sales people. Growth for us is proportionally bigger than the market generally.”
