18 months ago I wrote about my idea for a replicated filesystem for FreeBSD, then posted it to the FreeBSD mailing lists. So I was quite pleased to read that the FreeBSD Foundation have awarded a grant to fund the creation of storage replication software.

I should point out that my replicated filesystem proposal wasn't completely original, having had familiarity with Symantec Veritas Volume Replicator. Neither am I claiming that HAST is what I proposed. However there are similarities in the goals, with both providing a geom and replicating over TCP/IP. There is no detail on the implementation of HAST, so I'll be intrigued to read the source to see how it works.

As for my proposal, I was encouraged on the mailing list by Poul-Henning Kamp to "Go for it!". Sadly I never got further than modifying the metadata and creating daemons which negotiate, but never actually read journals from disk. Maybe one day...