PowerFolder – Peer-to-Peer powered Sync and Share

<!--HTML-->PowerFolder is a peer-to-peer (P2P) sync and share solution which started as spin-off from the University of Cologne and University of Applied Science Niederrhein in 2007. It is available as commercial and open-source solution and in use by hundreds of education and research organization and several thousand businesses. The software enables datacenter providers, NRENs or any education and research organization to operate its own PowerFolder cloud as alternative to public clouds while preserving the same end-user experience: Access to data anywhere on any device (Windows, Linux, Apple, Web, Android and iOS). While approaches to sync and share data from/to a single central location have several drawbacks the PowerFolder solution offers a unique peer-to-peer algorithm to replicate and transfer data between sites, users and devices with the freedom to choose whether to store or not to store files at the central hub. This is archived by intelligent; decentralize meta- and binary-data handling between nodes in a self-organizing hybrid peer-to-peer network. The approach increases the overall performance and scalability of the architecture and reduces time to replicate datasets. For security reasons data-access permissions and (federated) AAI remain centrally managed. The talk will introduce technical details of the implementation, outline existing scientific use-cases/installations and further developments of PowerFolder.