Design and implementation of a random data-placement system with high scalability, reliability and performance

Abstract

As storage system scales to thousands of disks, data distribution, load balance and the support for heterogeneous disks become increasingly important. In this paper, we present a new data-placement method named Weighted Interval Algorithm (WIA) for heterogeneous disks. Through it is not optimal in some circumstances, the difference between WIA and the optimal algorithm is trivial. Combined with replication, WIA can nearly balance access load and space utilization and improve reliability simultaneously. For the first time, we implement a data-placement system with high sealability, reliability and performance. The experimental results show that WIA reduces the average response time by 14.8% and decreases coefficient of relative load from 78.09% to 47.46% while the difference of the ratio of space utilization between disks is not more than 0.79%. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.