Efficient Metadata Management for Cloud Computing applications
Abhishek Verma, Shivaram Venkataraman · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 2010
Cloud computing applications require a scalable, elastic and fault tolerant storage system. In this paper, we describe how metadata management can be improved for a file system built for large scale data-intensive applications. We implement Ring File System (RFS), that uses a single hop Distributed Hash Table, found in peer-to-peer systems, to manage its metadata and a traditional client server model for managing the actual data. Our solution does not have a single point of failure, since the metadata is replicated and the number of files that can be stored and the throughput of metadata operations scales linearly with the number of servers. We compare against two open source implementations of Google File System (GFS): HDFS and KFS and show that our prototype performs better in terms of fault tolerance, scalability and throughput. 1.