A novel dynamic metadata management scheme for large distributed storage systems

Abstract

In large distributed storage systems, metadata is usually managed separately by a metadata server cluster. The partitioning of the metadata among the servers is of critical importance for maintaining efficient MDS operation and a desirable load distribution across the cluster. We present a Dynamic Directory Partitioning (DDP) metadata management scheme, directory metadata and file metadata are managed in different ways, and the dynamically changing workload can be balanced by adjusting the metadata distribution on metadata servers. Our simulation results show that our approach, comparing with other metadata management strategies, has advantages in performance, scalability and adaptability. © 2008 IEEE.