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arXiv · 1611.01594

MetaFlow: a Scalable Metadata Lookup Service for Distributed File Systems in Data Centers

Peng Sun·Yonggang Wen·Ta Nguyen Binh Duong·Haiyong Xie
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Abstract

In large-scale distributed file systems, efficient meta- data operations are critical since most file operations have to interact with metadata servers first. In existing distributed hash table (DHT) based metadata management systems, the lookup service could be a performance bottleneck due to its significant CPU overhead. Our investigations showed that the lookup service could reduce system throughput by up to 70%, and increase system latency by a factor of up to 8 compared to ideal scenarios. In this paper, we present MetaFlow, a scalable metadata lookup service utilizing software-defined networking (SDN) techniques to distribute lookup workload over network components. MetaFlow tackles the lookup bottleneck problem by leveraging B-tree, which is constructed over the physical topology, to manage flow tables for SDN-enabled switches. Therefore, metadata requests can be forwarded to appropriate servers using only switches. Extensive performance evaluations in both simulations and testbed showed that MetaFlow increases system throughput by a factor of up to 3.2, and reduce system latency by a factor of up to 5 compared to DHT-based systems. We also deployed MetaFlow in a distributed file system, and demonstrated significant performance improvement.

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Peng Sun, Yonggang Wen, Ta Nguyen Binh Duong, Haiyong Xie. 2016-11-10. MetaFlow: a Scalable Metadata Lookup Service for Distributed File Systems in Data Centers. https://doi.org/10.1109/tbdata.2016.2612241

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