Tornado File System Architecture

Motivation

Traditional file systems assume storage means “data at rest on a disk.” But disk introduces latency, wear, and a static attack surface. What if data never stopped moving? A file system where storage is the network itself — data lives in fiber optic cables and RAM buffers, continuously circulating through a ring of servers.

This is not a cache layer or a CDN. This is storage as motion.

Proposal

The Wind

A ring of at least 3 servers that receive QUIC streams and immediately forward them to the next node, keeping data perpetually in motion. There is no “write to disk” step — data exists only in transit and in RAM buffers during forwarding.

Protocol Layer

• QUIC multiplexed streams — one stream per file, enabling fine-grained flow control
• Unreliable datagrams (RFC 9221) — for file chunks that can tolerate loss, reducing latency
• User-space control — fine-grained bandwidth throttling per file/stream

Storage Capacity

Storage capacity is bounded by the Bandwidth-Delay Product:

Capacity = Bandwidth × Round-Trip Latency

For a 100 Gbps ring with 10ms RTT: ~125 MB of in-flight data. Scaling requires more bandwidth, more nodes (increasing RTT), or both.

Reliability

Data in motion means packet loss = data loss. The system uses Forward Error Correction (FEC) to rebuild files from inevitable packet loss without retransmission delays. Each file is encoded with redundant chunks so that any k of n chunks are sufficient to reconstruct the original.

File Operations

• Read — tap into the ring and capture the stream for the requested file
• Write — inject a new stream into the ring, which begins circulating immediately
• Delete — stop forwarding the stream; data dissipates as packets drain from the ring

Alternatives Considered

• RAM disk (tmpfs) — data at rest in memory, single point of failure, no network distribution
• Distributed cache (Redis Cluster) — data at rest in RAM, not in motion, requires explicit replication
• Network-attached storage (NFS/iSCSI) — traditional disk-backed, adds network latency on top of disk latency

Decision

Pending — draft stage.