Providing Consistent State to Distributed Storage System

Abstract

In cloud storage systems, users must be able to shut down the application when not in use and restart it from the last consistent state when required. BlobSeer is a data storage application, specially designed for distributed systems, that was built as an alternative solution for the existing popular open-source storage system-Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). In a cloud model, all the components need to stop and restart from a consistent state when the user requires it. One of the limitations of BlobSeer DFS is the possibility of data loss when the system restarts. As such, it is important to provide a consistent start and stop state to BlobSeer components when used in a Cloud environment to prevent any data loss. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of BlobSeer providing a consistent state distributed data storage system with the integration of checkpointing restart functionality. To demonstrate the availability of a consistent state, we set up a cluster with multiple machines and deploy BlobSeer entities with checkpointing functionality on various machines. We consider uncoordinated checkpoint algorithms for their associated benefits over other alternatives while integrating the functionality to various BlobSeer components such as the Version Manager (VM) and the Data Provider. The experimental results show that with the integration of the checkpointing functionality, a consistent state can be ensured for a distributed storage system even when the system restarts, preventing any possible data loss after the system has encountered various system errors and failures.