The Tahoe Least-Authority Filesystem (Tahoe-LAFS) is an open source

Open source

The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...

, secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant, peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer

Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...

 filesystem. It is being used as an online backup system by Least Authority Enterprises. It can also serve as a file or web host similar to Freenet

Freenet

Freenet is a decentralized, censorship-resistant distributed data store originally designed by Ian Clarke. According to Clarke, Freenet aims to provide freedom of speech through a peer-to-peer network with strong protection of anonymity; as part of supporting its users' freedom, Freenet is free and...

, depending on the front-end used to insert and access files in the Tahoe system. Tahoe can also be used in a RAID

RAID

RAID is a storage technology that combines multiple disk drive components into a logical unit...

-like manner to use multiple disks to make a single large RAIN

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Nodes

Reliable/redundant array of independent/inexpensive nodes is an architectural approach to computing and network-attached computer storage , that combines commodity or low-cost computing hardware with management software to address the reliability and availability shortcomings of non-redundant NAS...

 pool of reliable data storage.

The system is designed and implemented around the "Principle of Least Authority" (POLA). Strict adherence to this convention is enabled by the use of cryptographic capabilities which grant the minimal set of privileges necessary to accomplish a given task to requesting agents. A Redundant Array of Inexpensive Nodes

Redundant Array of Inexpensive Nodes

Reliable/redundant array of independent/inexpensive nodes is an architectural approach to computing and network-attached computer storage , that combines commodity or low-cost computing hardware with management software to address the reliability and availability shortcomings of non-redundant NAS...

 act as storage servers—these servers do not need to be trusted for confidentiality or integrity of the stored data.

See also

• GlusterFS
  GlusterFS
  GlusterFS is a scale-out NAS file system developed by Gluster. It aggregates various storage servers over Ethernet or Infiniband RDMA interconnect into one large parallel network file system. GlusterFS is based on a stackable user space design without compromising performance. It has found a...
  
  
• XtreemFS
  XtreemFS
  XtreemFS is an object-based, distributed file system for wide area networks. The file system replicates objects for fault tolerance and caches metadata and data to improve performance over high-latency links. SSL and X.509 certificates support make XtreemFS usable over public networks...
  
  
• Lustre (file system)
  Lustre (file system)
  Lustre is a massively parallel distributed file system, generally used for large scale cluster computing. The name Lustre is a portmanteau word derived from Linux and cluster...
  
  
• Ceph
  Ceph
  -External links:* *...
  
  
• Parallel Virtual File System
• List of file systems