Moving towards 1.3

As you might have noticed, we are currently a full year behind schedule with the 1.3 release. The good news is that we are working heavily on the new release.

We now have a new client written from scratch that implements important features such a replica failover and metadata caching. The new client already passes our complete test suite (see http://groups.google.com/group/xtreemfs-test). Currently, we are cleaning up the code, work on a libxtreemfs, porting the client to windows and a lot of manual testing for the release.

Most of the changes we have worked on since last year are invisible to the user. First of all, we have switched the internal protocol to a custom RPC format which is optimized for transfer of raw data (the file content) and uses Google protocol buffers for message encoding. For this new RPC protocol, we have re-written and optimized the client and server infrastructure. The new protocol is up to 2x faster when transferring objects. As a user, you'll notice that the URLs now start with "pbrpc://" instead of "oncrpc://".

Over the next few weeks, we'll write short posts on the stuff we have been working, e.g. the PBRPC protocol, the new client features and internals, read/write replication for files, MRC replication ...
Of course, we'll keep you updated on the 1.3 release.

For anyone who wants to throw a first glance at XtreemFS 1.3, we set up a repository with unstable packages: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/xtreemfs:/unstable/
Please be aware that these packages are experimental and may be changed or updated without prior notice.