This paper introduces the Wave Transactional Filesystem (WTF), a novel, transactional, POSIX-compatible filesystem based on a new file slicing API that enables efficient file transformations. WTF provides transactional access to a distributed filesystem, eliminating the possibility of inconsistencies across multiple files. Further, the file slicing API enables applications to construct files from the contents of other files without having to rewrite or relocate data. Combined, these enable a new class of high-performance applications. Experiments show that WTF can qualitatively outperform the industry-standard HDFS distributed filesystem, up to a factor of four in a sorting benchmark, by reducing I O costs. Microbenchmarks indicate that the new features of WTF impose only a modest overhead on top of the POSIX-compatible API.
Flat Datacenter Storage (FDS) is a high-performance, fault-tolerant, large-scale, locality-oblivious blob store. Using a novel combination of full bisection bandwidth networks, data and metadata striping, and flow control, FDS multiplexes an application's large-scale I O across the available throughput and latency budget of every disk in a cluster. FDS therefore makes many optimizations around data locality unnecessary. Disks also communicate with each other at their full bandwidth, making recovery from disk failures extremely fast. FDS is designed for datacenter scale, fully distributing metadata operations that might otherwise become a bottleneck. FDS applications achieve single-process read and write performance of more than 2GB s. We measure recovery of 92GB data lost to disk failure in 6.2 s and recovery from a total machine failure with 655GB of data in 33.7 s. Application performance is also high: we describe our FDS-based sort application which set the 2012 world record for disk-to-disk sorting. Blizzard is a high-performance block store that exposes cloud storage to cloud-oblivious POSIX and Win32 applications. Blizzard connects clients and servers using a network with full-bisection bandwidth, allowing clients to access any remote disk as fast as if it were local. Using a novel striping scheme, Blizzard exposes high disk parallelism to both sequential and random workloads; also, by decoupling the durability and ordering requirements expressed by flush requests, Blizzard can commit writes out-of-order, providing high performance and crash consistency to applications that issue many small, random IOs. Blizzard's virtual disk drive, which clients mount like a normal physical one, provides maximum throughputs of 1200 MB s, and can improve the performance of unmodified, cloud-oblivious applications by 2x-10x. Compared to EBS, a commercially available, state-of-the-art virtual drive for cloud applications, Blizzard can improve SQL server IOp rates by seven-fold while still providing crash consistency.