A seamless and reliable distributed network file system utilizing webspace

A distributed file system integrates the storage devices on the network and stores files on remote file servers so that clients can access them through Internet anytime and anywhere. However, to ensure the reliability and security of critical data, the maintenance cost is usually high. Some researches propose solutions to use webspace as storage. These are efficient for individual users or small enterprises. However, these solutions have three drawbacks: 1) they support only single specific webspace, 2) they can not ensure data confidentiality, and 3) they can not ensure data reliability. This paper introduces a distributed file system, the General File System (GFS), which integrates the advantage of distributed file system and the convenience of webspace. GFS also integrates several heterogeneous spaces and promises the reliability and security. Besides, for users, it is easy to operate GFS through the interface provided by the virtual file system. At the end, the experiments result shows that GFS outperform than other solutions using webspace.