Name
Title | ||
|---|---|---|
File systems unfit as distributed storage backends: lessons from 10 years of Ceph evolution |
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
For a decade, the Ceph distributed file system followed the conventional wisdom of building its storage backend on top of local file systems. This is a preferred choice for most distributed file systems today because it allows them to benefit from the convenience and maturity of battle-tested code. Ceph's experience, however, shows that this comes at a high price. First, developing a zero-overhead transaction mechanism is challenging. Second, metadata performance at the local level can significantly affect performance at the distributed level. Third, supporting emerging storage hardware is painstakingly slow.
Ceph addressed these issues with BlueStore, a new back-end designed to run directly on raw storage devices. In only two years since its inception, BlueStore outperformed previous established backends and is adopted by 70% of users in production. By running in user space and fully controlling the I/O stack, it has enabled space-efficient metadata and data checksums, fast overwrites of erasure-coded data, inline compression, decreased performance variability, and avoided a series of performance pitfalls of local file systems. Finally, it makes the adoption of backwards-incompatible storage hardware possible, an important trait in a changing storage landscape that is learning to embrace hardware diversity.
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Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2019 | 10.1145/3341301.3359656 | Proceedings of the 27th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles |
Keywords | Field | DocType |
Ceph, distributed file system, file system, object storage, storage backend | Distributed File System,Metadata,File system,Checksum,Object storage,Computer science,Distributed data store,User space,Database transaction,Operating system,Distributed computing | Conference |
Volume | Issue | ISBN |
45 | 1 | 978-1-4503-6873-5 |
Citations | PageRank | References |
3 | 0.43 | 20 |
Authors | ||
6 | ||
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abutalib Aghayev | 1 | 3 | 0.43 |
| Sage A. Weil | 2 | 3 | 0.43 |
| Michael Kuchnik | 3 | 3 | 1.44 |
| Mark Nelson | 4 | 3 | 0.43 |
| Gregory R. Ganger | 5 | 4560 | 383.16 |
| George Amvrosiadis | 6 | 111 | 10.40 |