File transfer startup Infinit has a new product that could potentially change the way DevOps engineers think about storage. With Infinit’s new file storage platform, you can unify all sorts of storage buckets into a virtual drive that you can access on all your computers and servers. It’s a seamless decentralized file system.
“We have a solution for DevOps engineers or sysadmins so that they can create their dream storage solution in a few minutes,” co-founder and CEO Baptiste Fradin told me. “Let’s say I have multiple network-attached storages in Paris, others around in the world in other offices. I can unify all these storage resources and have a high availability thanks to dynamic redundancy.”
Once installed, it only takes a few command lines to aggregate storage resources and create a beefy virtual drive. The product works with hard drives on servers or computers. It also supports AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Backblaze B2 as well as consumer solutions, such as Dropbox and Google Drive.
After that, it’s very flexible as you can easily scale up or down your storage infrastructure, grant access and customize redundancy. DevOps engineers could easily write scripts to set up more virtual drives. It’s like using Docker but for your storage needs. The best part is that the company plans to open source each layer of its file system in the future.
Behind the scene, files are encrypted and distributed using a peer-to-peer model. If you have set up redundancy, the system can automatically heals itself if a server fails. It’s a modern approach to file storage platforms and much better than existing enterprise solutions.
And for other employees, they can download a desktop app with a graphical user interface so that they can join existing drives. These virtual drives show up in the Finder. They can then drag and drop folders, open and save files. It’s exactly like using a network drive, making it a good solution for companies with important file requirements.
Infinit targets medium-sized companies with 300 or 400 employees. For these companies, unifying storage resources from their servers and cloud providers is quite powerful. It allows you to create a cheap unified storage platform that anyone in your company can use.
