D-Rex: Heterogeneity-Aware Reliability Framework and Adaptive Algorithms for Distributed Storage

Abstract

The exponential growth of data necessitates distributed storage models, such as peer-to-peer systems and data federations. While distributed storage can reduce costs and increase reliability, the heterogeneity in storage capacity, I/O performance, and failure rates of storage resources makes their efficient use a challenge. Further, node failures are common and can lead to data unavailability and even data loss. Erasure coding is a common resiliency strategy implemented in storage systems to mitigate failures by striping data across storage locations. However, erasure coding is computationally expensive and existing systems do not consider the heterogeneous resources and their varied capacity and performance when placing data chunks. We tackle the challenges of using erasure coding with distributed and heterogeneous nodes, aiming to store as much data as possible, minimize encoding and decoding time, and meeting user-defined reliability requirements for each data item. We propose two new dynamic scheduling algorithms, D-Rex LB and D-Rex SC, that adaptively choose erasure coding parameters and map chunks to heterogeneous nodes. D-Rex SC achieves robust performance for both storage utilization and throughput, at a higher computational cost, while D-Rex LB is faster but with slightly less competitive performance. In addition, we propose two greedy algorithms, GreedyMinStorage and GreedyLeastUsed, that optimize for storage utilization and load balancing, respectively. Our experimental evaluation shows that our dynamic schedulers store, on average, 45% more data items without significantly degrading I/O throughput compared to state-of-the-art algorithms, while GreedyLeastUsed is able to store 21% more data items while also increasing throughput.