Cloud by name indicates something which is very huge and present
over a large area. Going by the name, in technical field, Cloud is something
which is virtual and provides services to end users in form of storage, hosting
of apps or virtualizing any physical space. Now a days, Cloud computing is used
by small as well as large organizations for data storage or providing customers
with its advantages which are listed above.
12 Free Open Source Cloud Storage
Software’s
Mainly, three types of Services come
associated with Cloud which are: SaaS (Software as a Service) for
allowing users to access other publically available clouds of large organizations
for storing their data like: gmail, PaaS (Platform as a
Service) for hosting of apps or software on Others public cloud ex: Google
App Engine which hosts apps of users, IaaS (Infrastructure as a
Service) for virtualizing any physical machine and availing it to customers
to make them get feel of a real machine.
Cloud
Storage
Cloud Storage means storage of data
away from users local system and across the span of dedicated servers which are
meant for this. At its earliest, CompuServe in 1983 offered its customers 128k
of disk space which could be used to store files. Whereas this field is under
active development and will be because of potential threats including: loss of
data or information, data hacking or masquerading and other attacks, many
organizations have come forward with their own solutions to Cloud Storage and
Data Privacy which is strengthening and stabilizing its future.
In this article, we will present
some of selected contributions for this concern which are open source and
successfully being accepted by huge masses and big organizations.
1.
OwnCloud
A Dropbox replacement for Linux users, giving many
functionalities which are similar to that of DropBox, ownCloud is a self-hosted
file sync and share server.
Its open source functionality
provides users with access to unlimited amount of storage space. Project
started in January 2010 with aim to provide open source replacement for
proprietary cloud storage service providers. It is written in PHP, JavaScript
and available for Windows, Linux, OS X desktops and even successfully provides
mobile clients for Android and iOS.
OwnCloud employs WebDav server for
remote access and can integrate with large number of Databases including:
SQLite, MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle Database, PostgreSQL.
Provides large number of features
countable of which include: File storage and encryption, Music Streaming,
content sharing across URL’s, Mozilla sync hosting and RSS/Atom feed reader,
one-click app installation, Video and PDF viewer and many more.
The latest version of ownCloud i.e. 8.2
adds on other new features including: improved design, allows admin to notify
users and set retention limits on files in the trash.
OwnCloud
2.
Seafile
Another file hosting software system
which exploits open source property to avail its users with all advantages they
expect from a good cloud storage software system. It is written in C, Python
with latest stable release being 4.4.3 released on 15th October 2015.
Seafile provides desktop client for
Windows, Linux, and OS X and mobile clients for Android, iOS and Windows Phone.
Along with a community edition released under General Public License, it also
has a professional edition released under commercial license which provides
extra features not supported in community edition i.e. user logging and text
search.
Since it got open sourced in July
2012, it started gaining international attention. Its main features are
syncing and sharing with main focus on data safety. Other features of Seafile
which have made it common in many universities like: University Mainz,
University HU Berlin and University Strasbourg and also among other thousands
of people worldwide are: online file editing, differential sync to minimize the
bandwidth required, client-side encryption to secure client data.
Seafile Cloud Storage
3.
Pydio
Earlier known by the name AjaXplorer,
Pydio is a freeware aiming to provide file hosting, sharing and syncing.
As a project it was initiated in 2009 by Charles du jeu and since
2010, it is on all NAS equipment’s supplied by LaCie.
Pydio is written in PHP and
JavaScript and available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux and additionally for iOS
and Android also. With nearly 500,000 downloads on Sourceforge, and
acceptance by companies like Red Hat and Oracle, Pydio is one of the very
popular Cloud Storage Software in the market.
In itself, Pydio is just a core
which runs on a web server and can be accessed through any browser. Its
integrated WebDAV interface makes it ideal for online file management and
SSL/TLS encryption makes transmission channels encrypted securing the data and
ensuring its privacy. Other features which come with this software are: text
editor with syntax highlighting, audio and video playback, integration of
Amazon, S3, FTP or MySQL Databases, image editor, file or folder sharing even
through public URL’s.
Pydio Cloud Storage
4.
Ceph
Ceph was initially started by Sage Well for his doctoral
dissertation, and in fall 2007 he continued on this project full time and
expanded the development team. In April 2014 Red Hat brought its development
in-house. Till now 8 releases of Ceph have been released latest being Hammer in
April 7, 2015. Ceph is a distributed cluster written in C++ and Perl and highly
scalable and freely available.
Data can be populated in Ceph as
block device, a file or in form Object through RADOS gateway which can present
support for Amazon S3 and Openstack Swift API’s. Apart from being secure in
terms of data, Scalable and reliable, other features provided by Ceph are:
- network file system which aims for high performance and
large data storage.
- compatibility to VM clients.
- allowance of partial/complete reads/ writes.
- object level mappings.
Ceph Storage
5.
Syncany
Released in about an year ago in
near March 2014, Syncany is one of the lightest and open source cloud
storage and file sharing application. It is currently being actively developed
by Philipp C. Heckel and as of today, is available as a command line tool for
all supported platforms, but GUI version is under active development.
One of the most important feature
about Syncany is that it is a tool and requires you to bring in your own
storage, which can be FTP or SFTP storage, WebDAV or Samba Shares, Amazon S3
buckets etc.
Other features which make it an
awesome tool to have are: 128-bit AES+Twofish/GCM encryption for all the data
leaving the local machine, file sharing support with which you can share your
files with your friends, offsite storage as chosen by user instead of
provider-based storage, interval-based or on-demand backups, binary compatible
file versioning, local deduplication of files. It can be more advantageous for
companies who want to use their own storage space rather trusting some
providers provided storage.
Syncany Cloud Storage
6.
Cozy
Not just a file sharing or
synchronization tool or software, Cozy is bundled as a complete package
of functions that can help you build your complete App Engine.
Like Syncany, Cozy
provides flexibility to user in terms of storage space. You can either use your
own personal storage or trust Cozy team’s servers. It relies on some open
source software’s for its complete functioning which are: CouchDB for
Database storage and Whoosh for indexing. It is available for all platforms
including smartphones.
Main features which make it a must
to have Cloud storage software are: ability to store all the Contacts, Files,
Calendar, etc in the Cloud and sync them between laptop and smartphone, provides
ability to user to create his own apps and share them with other users by just
sharing Git URL of the repository, hosting static websites or HTML5
video game consoles.
As a step further to provide its
availability even for cheap hardware’s, Cozy team has introduced Cozy Light
which performs well even on cheap hardware’s like: Rasberry Pi, small Digital
Ocean VPS etc.
Cozy Cloud Storage
7.
GlusterFS
GlusterFS is a network attached file storage system. Initially,
started by Gluster Inc., this project is now under Red Hat Inc. After their
purchase of Gluster Inc in 2011. Red Hat integrated Gluster FS with their Red
Hat Storage Server changing its name to Red Hat Gluster Storage. It is
available for platforms including Linux, OS X, NetBSd and OpenSolaris with some
of its parts licensed under GPLv3 while others dual licensed under GPLv2. It
has been used as a foundation for academic research.
GlusterFs uses a client-server model
with servers being deployed as storage bricks. Client can connect to server
with custom protocol over TCP/IP, Infiband or SDP and store files to the
GlusterFs server. Various functionalities being employed by it over the files
are: file-based mirroring and replication, file-based stripping, load
balancing, scheduling and disk caching to name a few.
Other very useful feature of it is
that it is flexible i.e. data here is stored on native file systems like: xfs,
ext4 etc.
GlusterFS Storage
8.
StackSync
StackSync is a Dropbox like tool running on top of OpenStack swift
which is specially designed to tackle the needs of organizations to sync their
data at one place. It us written in Java and released under GNU General public license
v3.
Its framework is composed of three
main components: a synchronization server, Openstack swift, desktop &
mobile clients. While the server processes metadata and logic, Openstack is
focused on storing the metadata while desktop and mobile clients help users
sync their data to their personal cloud.
StackSync employs various data
optimizations that allow it to scale to cater the needs of thousands of people
with efficient use of cloud resources. Its other features are: provision of
RESTful API as a Swift module which allows mobile apps and other third party
applications to use it to sync data, separation between data and metadata which
makes it flexible for deployment based on different configurations, provides
both Public configuration which is useful for Public Cloud providers and
Private configuration which solves the problems of big organizations aiming for
a better cloud storage solution.
StackSync Cloud Storage
9.
Git-annex
Git-annex is another file synchronization service developed by Joey
Hess, released in October 2010 which also aims to solve file sharing and
synchronization problems but independent of any commercial service or central
server. It is written in Haskell and available for Linux, Android, OS X and
Windows.
Git-annex manages the git repository
of the user without storing the session into git again. But instead it stores
only the linking to the file in the git repository and manages the files
associated to the link at a separate place. It ensures the duplicacy of file
which is needed in case recovery of lost information is required.
Further, it ensures availability of
file data instantly as and when required which prevents files to present on
each system. This reduces a lot of memory overhead. Notably, git-annex is
available on various Linux distributions including: Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian etc.
Git-Annex
10.
Yandex.Disk
Yandex.Disk is a cloud storage and synchronization service released in
April 2012 and available on all major platforms including: Linux, Windows, OS
X, Android, iOS and Windows Phone. It allows users to synchronize data between
different devices and share it with others online.
Various features provided by
Yandex.Disk to its users are: built-in flash player that lets people preview
songs, sharing of files with others by sharing download links, synchronization
of files between different devices of same user, unlimited storage, WebDAV
support allowing easy management of files by any application supporting WebDAV
protocol.
Yandex-Disk
11.
Bitcasa
Developed by Bitcasa Inc. Which is a
California Based company, Bitcasa is yet another solution for open source Cloud
Storage and synchronization available for Windows, OS X, Android and Linux. Not
directly an open source software, but it is still a part of Open Source
community as it uses those software’s of which many are open sourced like:
gcc/clang, libCurl, OpenSSL, APR, Rapid JSON etc.
With main features being file
storage, access and sharing other features which make it popular among
customers across more than 140 countries worldwide are: its convergent
encryption protocol which is mostly safe but with less risks associated with it
as reported by an article, provision of secure API’s and white label storage
applications for OEM’s, network operators and software developers.
Bitcasa Storage
12.
NAS4Free
NAS is acronym for ‘Network Attached Storage‘ and ‘4Free‘
indicates its free and open source nature. NAS4Free released under this name in
March 2012. It is a network attached storage server software with a user
interface written in PHP and released under Simplified BSD License. It supports
platforms including i386/IA-32 and x86-64.
NAS4Free supports sharing across
multiple Operating Systems. It also includes ZFS, disk encryption etc with protocols
such as: Samba, CARP, Bridge, FTP, RSYNC, TFTP, NFS. Unlike other software’s,
NAS4Free can be installed and operated from USB/ SSD Key, Hard Disk or can even
be booted from LiveCD, LiveUSB with small USB key for config storage. NAS4Free
has won awards including Project of month (August 2015) and Project of the week
(May 2015).
NAS4Free Network Storage
Conclusion
These are some known Open Source
Cloud storage and synchronization software’s which have either gained a lot of
popularity over the years or have just been able to enter and make their mark
in this industry with a long way to go. You can share any software that you or
your organization might be using and we will be listing that with this list.
