A Load-Aware Multistripe Concurrent Update Scheme in Erasure-Coded Storage System

Abstract

Erasure coding has been widely deployed in today’s data centers for it can significantly reduce extra storage costs while providing high storage reliability. However, erasure coding introduced more network traffic and computational overhead in the data update process. How to improve the efficiency and mitigate the system imbalance during the update process in erasure coding is still a challenging problem. Recently, most of the existing update schemes of erasure codes only focused on the single stripe update scenario and ignored the heterogeneity of the node and network status which cannot sufficiently deal with the problems of low update efficiency and load imbalance caused by the multistripe concurrent update. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a Load-Aware Multistripe concurrent Update (LAMU) scheme in erasure-coded storage systems. Notably, LAMU introduces the Software-Defined Network (SDN) mechanism to measure the node loads and network status in real time. It selects nonduplicated nodes with better performance such as CPU utilization, remaining memory, and I/O load as the computing nodes for multiple update stripes. Then, a multiattribute decision-making method is used to schedule the network traffic generated in the update process. This mechanism can improve the transmission efficiency of update traffic and make LAMU adapt to the multistripe concurrent update scenarios in heterogeneous network environments. Finally, we designed a prototype system of multistripe concurrent updates. The extensive experimental results show that LAMU could improve the update efficiency and provide better system load-balancing performance.