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FastStor: improving the performance of a large scale hybrid storage system via caching and prefetching

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Abstract

Storing enormous amount of data on hybrid storage systems has become a widely accepted solution for today’s production level applications in order to trade off the performance and cost. However, how to improve the performance of large scale storage systems with hybrid components (e.g. solid state disks, hard drives and tapes) and complicated user behaviors is not fully explored. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth case study (we call it FastStor) on designing a high performance hybrid storage system to support one of the world’s largest satellite images distribution systems operated by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) center. We demonstrate how to combine conventional caching policies with innovative current popularity oriented and user-specific prefetching algorithms to improve the performance of the EROS system. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed solution using over 5 million real world user download requests provided by EROS. Our experimental results show that using the Least Recently Used (LRU) caching policy alone, we are able to achieve an overall 64 % or 70 % hit ratio on a 100 TB or 200 TB FTP server farm composed of Solid State Disks (SSDs) respectively. The hit ratio can be further improved to 70 % (for 100 TB SSDs) and 76 % (for 200 TB SSDs) if intelligent prefetching algorithms are used together with LRU.

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Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely appreciate the comments and feedback from the anonymous reviewers. The work reported in this paper is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grants No. CNS-0915762 and CNS-1212535. We also gratefully acknowledge the support from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) center.

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  1. Department of Computer Science, Texas State University, 601 University Dr., San Marcos, TX, 78666, USA

    Ziliang Zong, Ribel Fares, Brian Romoser & Joal Wood

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  1. Ziliang Zong
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  2. Ribel Fares
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  3. Brian Romoser
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  4. Joal Wood
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Correspondence to Ziliang Zong.

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Zong, Z., Fares, R., Romoser, B. et al. FastStor: improving the performance of a large scale hybrid storage system via caching and prefetching. Cluster Comput 17, 593–604 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-013-0304-5

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