File System Scalability with Highly Decentralized Metadata on Independent Storage Devices
This paper discusses using hard drives that integrate a key value interface and network access in the actual drive hardware (Kinetic storage platform) to supply file system functionality in a large scale environment. Taking advantage of higher level functionality to handle metadata on the drives themselves, a serverless system architecture is proposed. Skipping path component traversal during the lookup operation is the key technique discussed in this paper to avoid performance degradation with highly decentralized metadata. Scalability implications are reviewed based on a fuse file system implementation.
2016 16th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid)