Carnegie Mellon University Parallel Data Lab Technical Report CMU-PDL-12-112. October 2012.
James Cipar, Lianghong Xu, Elie Krevat, Alexey Tumanov Nitin Gupta, Michael A. Kozuch*, Gregory R. Ganger
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
*Intel Labs
Elastic storage systems can be expanded or contracted to meet current demand, allowing servers to be turned off or used for other tasks. However, the usefulness of an elastic distributed storage system is limited by its agility: how quickly it can increase or decrease its number of servers. This paper describes an elastic storage system, called JackRabbit, that can quickly change its number of active servers. JackRabbit uses a combination of agility-aware offloading and reorganization techniques to minimize the work needed before deactivation or activation of servers. Analysis of real-world traces and experiments with the JackRabbit prototype confirm JackRabbit's agility and show that it significantly reduces wasted server-time relative to state-of-the-art designs.
KEYWORDS: cloud storage, distributed file systems
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