Sector/Sphere supports distributed data storage, distribution, and processing over large clusters of commodity computers. Sector is a distributed storage system. Sphere is a middleware for distributed data processing.
Sector/Sphere can be broadly compared to Google's GFS/MapReduce stack. However, Sector supports wide area deployment, while Sphere is more flexible because it supports user defined functions that can be either map, reduce, or others. Below is a summary of the key features of Sector/Sphere.
- Provides high performance distributed storage. Sector can also be installed over wide area networks, thus it can be used as a content distribution network.
- Provides persistent data storage. Sector automatically replicates data files in the systems.
- Provides simplified distributed application development support. Each processor in the system can process a data segment with any user defined function. Data location, movement, and fault tolerance is transparent to developers.
- Provides both data access tools and programming API in C++.
