A CDP method in an object-based file system

Abstract

Recent advances in large-capacity, low-cost storage devices have led to active research in design of large-scale storage system built from commodity devices. These storage systems are composed of thousands of storage device and require an efficient file system to provide high system bandwidth and petabyte-scale data storage. Object-based file system integrates advantage of both NAS and SAN, can be applied in above environment. Continuous data protection (CDP) is a methodology that continuously captures or tracks data modifications and stores changes independent of the primary data, enabling recovery points from any point in the past. All changes to files and file metadata are stored and managed. A CDP method in Object-based file system is presented in this thesis to improve the system reliability. Firstly, we can get detail at byte level of every write request because data protection operates at the file system level. It can consume less storage space. Secondly, every object storage server can compute the recovery strip data object independently to decrease the recovery time. Thirdly a journal-like metadata management way is introduced to provide metadata optimization for CDP.