Scalability Issues in a Reliable Distributed Video Storage System

摘要

This article studies the design and the performance of the CFS (Cluster File System), a fault-tolerant distributed storage system dedicated to video. Our goal is to provide a storage system that is efficient, with a good price/performance ratio, and with reliability properties. The CFS is implemented on a cluster of PCs connected with a high speed internal network. Its management is fully distributed among the cluster nodes so that there is no central component. Data are stored and retrieved among the cluster nodes using a Streaming RAID strategy, to enhance reliability. We show that a fully distributed approach enables to reduce the memory cost of the reliability scheme. We experimentally point out the scalability properties of this system.