CortxNTFS is a Windows NTFS compatible “virtual drive” technology that unifies traditional File with modern Object storage seamlessly, on premise, in the cloud or a hybrid of both. CortxNTFS is a traditional kernel-mode File System driver that is compatible with the low-level system API calls of the World’s #1 Operating System – Windows. It is provides block-level file i/o, not to local disk but to objects stored in a CORTX Object storage instance.
When the CortxNTFS software is installed, Windows sees a “virtual” drive backed by one or more CORTX Object storage instances, in a similar way to the way it sees a USB thumb drive as a connected storage drive. This drive can be up to 8.0 EBs (8 Million Terabytes) in size and can be dynamically grown as needed by adding more CORTX instances. The CortNTFS vDrive is NTFS security compatible which means it automatically supports the vast majority of Windows file-based applications.
CORTX is a distributed object storage system designed for great efficiency, massive capacity, and high HDD-utilization. CORTX is 100% Open Source.
Object storage has emerged as an alternative to traditional File System storage for large quantities of unstructured data. Whereas traditional hierarchical File System structures can get cumbersome as they grow very large, Object storage brings a “flat” structure with equal access to all objects held, making it eminently suitable for large volumes (i.e. billions or trillions of objects) of unstructured data. Further, Object storage objects in general support a richer set of custom metadata than the files and folders of a traditional File System can. This potentially makes the object data of Object storage better-suited for analytic use cases.
However, Object storage lacks the locking mechanism that enables concurrency that File System-based approaches support. In addition, Object storage tends to be the worst performing of all storage modes in part because of the heavier metadata overheads (although implementations such as CORTX Object storage are changing this!). This tends to make raw Object storage not well-suited to more time-critical operations such as transactional processes.
But perhaps the biggest problem with Object storage affecting Enterprise mass adoption is that the vast majority of existing Enterprise applications are File System centric and cannot work with Object storage without significant modifications. File systems are a key part of traditional on premise Enterprise computing systems, and remain the most common way that applications and operating systems store data. In contrast, Object storage was born in the cloud and provides an abstraction model for data that supports a broad range of customizable metadata. However, Object storage is not directly accessible to conventional applications, creating a barrier to entry into the Enterprise.
CortxNTFS unifies File and Object storage by allowing the Enterprise to have all of their applications “just work” with CORTX Object storage without the need to either re-factor them, or use slow gateways that translate between file and object. In this way CortxNTFS will drive adoption of CORTX within the Windows-dominated Enterprise environment seamlessly.
The technology used to build CortxNTFS came out of the larger World Computer project I have been working on for several years (see WorldComputer.org) which features a fully operational NTFS vDrive that is backed by Microsoft’s Azure Blob Storage service. That NTFS vDrive technology code was refactored into a standalone piece of software and then modified to support the CORTX S3 layer in addition to Azure Blob Storage. To complete the effort I added a software installer for CortxNTFS as well. The tech stack is C++ and C#.
See this video for a comprehensive demonstration of CortxNTFS in action.
See this guide for instructions on how to install and use CortxNTFS.