Shared community storage network

摘要

A hardware and/or software facility for durably and securely storing data within a shared community storage network. A user may have a storage device that they intend to share with others in the network. All or a portion of the storage device is registered with the community storage network as a storage node. Once registered with the network, third party data may be stored on the storage node and remotely accessed by third parties. In addition, data stored on the storage device by the user may be stored in the shared community storage network by encrypting the data, adding redundancy, and distributing it to other storage nodes within the storage network. Data that is stored in the storage network is accessible to the user even if their storage device is inaccessible or fails.

主权项

1. A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing computer executable instructions that when executed by a computer control the computer to perform a method of operating a network storage service constructed from a plurality of storage devices, the method comprising:
aggregating available storage space on a plurality of storage devices, where a member of the plurality of storage devices is accessed via a Wide Area Network (WAN) and has no service level guarantee, where a subset of the plurality of storage devices are super-nodes arranged in a ring network topology; offering the aggregated storage space to third parties as a network storage service for storing data, the network storage service being offered with a service level guarantee; coordinating the storage of third party data in the network storage service, where third party data is stored in an encrypted and redundant fashion, where storing third party data in a redundant fashion includes employing erasure encoding on the third party data before storing the third party data; monitoring usage information of a member of the plurality of storage devices, the usage information reflecting the use of the plurality of storage devices by third parties; upon determining that a performance level of a member of the subset of the plurality of storage devices has decreased below a threshold performance level, removing the member from the subset; upon determining that a performance level of a non-member of the subset has increased above a threshold performance level, adding the non-member to the subset, where the performance level is a function of location of a storage device, a bandwidth of a connection to the storage device, a processing capability of the storage device, or a reliability of the storage device; and charging the third parties in accordance with the determined usage information.