An initial evaluation of 6Stor, a dynamically scalable IPv6-centric distributed object storage system

Abstract

The exponentially growing demand for storage puts a huge stress on traditional distributed storage systems. Historically, I/Ops (Inputs/Outputs per second) of hard drives have been the main limitation of storage systems. With the rapid deployment of solid state drives (SSDs) and the expected evolutions of their capacities, price and performance, we claim that CPU and network capacities will become bottlenecks in the future. In this context, we introduce 6Stor, an innovative, software-defined distributed storage system fully integrated with the networking layer. This storage system departs from traditional approaches in two manners: it leverages IPv6 new capabilities to increase the efficiency of its data plane—notably by using directly UDP and TCP rather than HTTP—and thus its performance; and it circumvents scalability limitations of other distributed systems by using a fully distributed metadata layer of indirection to offer flexibility. In this paper, we introduce and describe in details the architecture of 6Stor, with an emphasis on dynamic scalability and robustness to failure. We also present a testbed that we use to evaluate our novel approach by using Ceph—another well known distributed storage system—as baseline. Results obtained on an extensive testbed are presented and some initial conclusions are drawn.