I have been using my spare time to develop Distributed-JBOD, which is a multi-node software system which allows the system administrator to combine together mixed hardware devices into a single object storage pool.

The storage pool can be created from arbitrary hardware. Regular consumer-grade desktop PCs are suitable, with whatever mixed layout of disk storage is available in each one.

Disks require no special formatting. A simple directory on an ext-4 filesystem is suitable.

I was pushed to design and build this system as a consequence of MinIO pulling their community tier software. I have been running an MinIO server for several years, but have started to migrate away from that and could not find a suitable replacement, so I built Distributed-JBOD.

* As many of you will be aware, MinIO requires identical disks to perform effectively. Distributed-JBOD does not, it will work effectively across a pool of arbitrary hardware, mixed size drives included.
* Garage replicates each object multiple times across multiple systems, which is not an efficient use of storage. Distributed-JBOD permits user-configurable Reed-Solomon Erasure Code parameters. This means storage is used efficiently, is protected against bit-rot, and the storage efficiency to resiliency ratio can be tuned. For example, while it is possible to run a mirrored setup, the typical default might be a 4:2 configuration, where data is sharded across 6 devices, 2 of which are parity blocks.
* Ceph is a datacenter grade product and requires a stack of servers for data storage, monitoring, gateway and other components. Distributed-JBOD has a simple single process design. (Caveat: The S3 compatibility layer will come later as a separate binary. You will be able to run it wherever you like.)
* SeeweedFS can't be used in a small scale cluster. Distributed-JBOD will run on a single machine with a single disk. If you want redundancy and data protection, a single machine with 2 disks is all you need. Greater efficiency is obtained by scaling up the number of disks, whichever host they sit in.

Distributed-JBOD is designed to work with an extremely small memory footprint, and does not require powerful hardware to run.

This is a very early stage product, but I would appreciate your thoughts and feedback. Some features which currently exist include TLS, administration web UI, CLI tools including recovery and bit-rot repair tools. Multi-language software client libraries are currently in the works, including libraries for Rust, Python and C++. An S3 compatibility later, multi-user support and permissions will also be supported soon.

[https://github.com/edward-b-1/Distributed-JBOD](https://github.com/edward-b-1/Distributed-JBOD)



Distributed-JBOD. Combine mixed hardware into a distributed, bit-rot protected object storage system