The FLAM Byte interface

The byte interface (access method) is based on the element interface and allows bytewise retrieval from compressed data as required by file I/O in the Open World (fread, fwrite). This function uses only the element type block. The original data are read with the current block size (4, 8, 64 kB) and the blocks are saved as an element in the FLAM archive so it can be retrieved later. The number of blocks making up a FLAM segment is freely adjustable. It is this number (that defaults to 128) that makes FLAM attractive for use in a cloud because it lets you determine how many blocks are transmitted with one connection setup (send). Using the default setting, latency time of a DSL connection drops from around 100 ms to under 1 ms per block. Moreover, on systems like Unix, Linux, or Windows this interface allows reading and writing FLAM5-archives as a subsystem, this fact being transparent to the application. This possibility may let FLAM appear as a drive or a path where the data are stored either locally by the FLAM client itself or remotely via the FLIES server after compression and encryption by the client. All this lets the byte interface be as an ideal basis for implementing secure clouds, where all data sit compressed and encrypted somewhere in the cloud and just the data actually needed move over the line - compressed and encrypted - and are transparently converted into plain data only when they reach their owner.