Ursa Minor: Versatile Cluster-based Storage (CMU-PDL-05-104)

Michael Abd-El-Malek, William V. Courtright, Chuck Cranor, Gregory R. Ganger, James Hendricks, Andrew J. Klosterman, Michael Mesnier, Manish Prasad, Brandon Salmon, Raja R. Sambasivan, Shafeeq Sinnamohideen, John D. Strunk (+3 others)
2018
No single encoding scheme or fault model is optimal for all data. A versatile storage system allows them to be matched to access patterns, reliability requirements, and cost goals on a per-data item basis. Ursa Minor is a cluster-based storage system that allows data-specific selection of, and on-line changes to, encoding schemes and fault models. Thus, different data types can share a scalable storage infrastructure and still enjoy specialized choices, rather than suffering from "one size fits
more » ... all." Experiments with Ursa Minor show performance benefits of 2–3× when using specialized choices as opposed to a single, more general, configuration. Experiments also show that a single cluster supporting multiple workloads simultaneously is much more efficient when the choices are specialized for each distribution rather than forced to use a "one size fits all" configuration. When using the specialized distributions, aggregate cluster throughput nearly doubled.
doi:10.1184/r1/6619859.v1 fatcat:ewjovjhmc5czhaopecdf7q44fy