BlobSeer: How to Enable Efficient Versioning for Large Object Storage under Heavy Access Concurrency

TL;DR

BlobSeer introduces a scalable versioning scheme for large distributed binary data objects, enabling high concurrency and efficient access through a novel metadata structure on a DHT, demonstrated on a large testbed.

Contribution

The paper presents a new metadata scheme based on a distributed segment tree for efficient versioning of large blobs in highly concurrent environments.

Findings

Supports high concurrency with efficient read/write/append operations

Scalable performance demonstrated on up to 175 nodes

Effective management of large distributed data objects

Abstract

To accommodate the needs of large-scale distributed P2P systems, scalable data management strategies are required, allowing applications to efficiently cope with continuously growing, highly dis tributed data. This paper addresses the problem of efficiently stor ing and accessing very large binary data objects (blobs). It proposesan efficient versioning scheme allowing a large number of clients to concurrently read, write and append data to huge blobs that are fragmented and distributed at a very large scale. Scalability under heavy concurrency is achieved thanks to an original metadata scheme, based on a distributed segment tree built on top of a Distributed Hash Table (DHT). Our approach has been implemented and experimented within our BlobSeer prototype on the Grid'5000 testbed, using up to 175 nodes.