For this latest version of XtreemFS, some major improvements were made to the existing code and new features were added. Some of the changes include:

• Improved stability: The development team calls the latest version “rock solid” and notes that a problem with client crashes caused by network timeouts and issues with the Read/Write file replication has been fixed.
• Asynchronous writes: With this functionality enabled, write() requests are executed in the background, improving write throughput without weakening semantics, according to the announcement.
• Windows Client (beta): The new version of the filesystem features a complete rewrite of this component.
• Hadoop support: The development team says XtreemFS can be used as replacement for HDFS in a Hadoop setup. The new version comes with a rewritten Hadoop client that provides data locality information to Hadoop.

According to the project blog, XtreemFS 1.4 is the result of almost 1000 commits to the code repository and extensive testing. And, because XtreemFS is an open source project, the team welcomes external contributions. A list of areas in which to contribute can be found on the project website at: http://xtreemfs.blogspot.de/.