OrangeFS vs Tahoe-LAFS
OrangeFS
orangefs.comTahoe-LAFS
tahoe-lafs.orgSide by side
| Figure | OrangeFS | Tahoe-LAFS |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 1 |
| Spec score · Distributed File System Software | 7.7 (#16) | 8.3 (#6) |
| Interfaces | Listed interfaces include a direct interface for Linux applications, Java JNI, an HCFS Hadoop interface, and WebDAV. | A gateway provides access to a storage grid through HTTP(S) and SFTP. |
| License | OrangeFS is released under the LGPL License, with some recent portions also available under LGPL and Apache 2. | The project offers the software under GNU GPL version 2 or later, or the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence version 1.0 or later. |
| Purpose | OrangeFS is a scale-out parallel storage system aimed at large storage workloads in HPC, Big Data, streaming video, genomics, and bioinformatics. | Tahoe-LAFS is a decentralized file storage system that encrypts files, splits them into shares, and distributes those shares across storage servers. |
| Support | Community support is available through the mailing list, and the maker offers commercial and research support. | The installation guide directs users who need help with deployment to the tahoe-dev mailing list or Libera.Chat IRC. |
Plans
In their own words
OrangeFS
OrangeFS is a free, open-source parallel storage system for large workloads in high-performance computing, Big Data, streaming video, genomics, and bioinformatics. Its user-level servers and clients let applications access disk storage across multiple servers in parallel. Configurable file striping and distributed metadata, including directory metadata, support this layout. OrangeFS supports Linux, macOS, Windows, APIs, and self-hosted deployment. Linux integration uses a kernel client available in the mainline kernel since version 4.6, and the documentation recommends the upstream kernel module. Other interfaces include a native Windows parallel client, FUSE for Linux and Mac, a direct Linux application interface, Java JNI, Hadoop HCFS, WebDAV, and optimized MPI-IO; S3 is also listed among the file access protocols. Security options include capability-based security and default, key-based, and certificate-based modes. LDAP mapping can associate a client certificate subject with a user ID and primary group ID. CloudyCluster offers configurable deployments through Google Cloud and AWS marketplaces. The open-source software is free; commercial and research support is available by quote.
Tahoe-LAFS
Tahoe-LAFS is free, open-source software for storing files across multiple servers. Before upload, a client encrypts each file with a unique key. Erasure coding distributes each file as shares, allowing recovery when some storage servers fail; the documented default uses 10 shares across at least 7 servers and can recover from any 3. A gateway checks integrity and ignores corrupted shares. Files can be immutable or mutable, with read-only or read-write access for mutable files and directories. The gateway gives access through HTTP(S) and SFTP, and a REST-style Web API supports programmatic operations. Users can run a gateway or operate a full grid of storage nodes and an introducer. Installation is documented for Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD. The software is available under GNU GPL version 2 or later, or the Transitive Grace Period Public Licence version 1.0 or later. It is free at free. The public test grid is for experimentation, not reliable or large-scale storage.