Efficient load balancing using active replica management
Jui-Pin Yang · 2016
Hotspot data access has a great impact on load balancing in a storage cluster. In this paper, an Active Replica Management scheme (ARM) is proposed to resolve this issue. ARM actively establishes copies of the hotspot data and efficiently distributes them to adequate storage nodes based on their residual number of copies related to hotspot data. In addition, ARM de-replicates the copies by considering the behaviors of hotspot data access and load conditions in each storage node. ARM improves load imbalance by using dynamic copies, and hence it can efficiently prevent partial storage nodes from over-burdening, which degrades overall system performance. Simulation results demonstrate that ARM tends to approach Optimal Load Balancing (OLB) and outperforms Static Load Balancing (SLB) and No Replica schemes in terms of fair load sharing.