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ORTHRUS: a lightweighted block-level cloud storage system

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Abstract

Taking advantage of distributed storage technology and virtualization technology, cloud storage systems provide virtual machine clients customizable storage service. They can be divided into two types: distributed file system and block level storage system. There are two disadvantages in existing block level storage system: Firstly, Some of them are tightly coupled with their cloud computing environments. As a result, it’s hard to extend them to support other cloud computing platforms; Secondly, The bottleneck of volume server seriously affects the performance and reliability of the whole system. In this paper we present a lightweighted block-level storage system for clouds—ORTHRUS, based on virtualization technology. We first design the architecture with multiple volume servers and its workflows, which can improve system performance and avoid the problem. Secondly, we propose a Listen-Detect-Switch mechanism for ORTHRUS to deal with contingent volume servers’ failure. At last we design a strategy that dynamically balances load between multiple volume servers. We characterize machine capability and load quantity with black box model, and implement the dynamic load balance strategy which is based on genetic algorithm. Extensive experimental results show that the aggregated I/O throughputs of ORTHRUS are significantly improved (approximately two times of that in Orthrus), and both I/O throughputs and IOPS are also remarkably improved (about 1.8 and 1.2 times, respectively) by our dynamic load balance strategy.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is supported by State Key Development Program of Basic Research of China under grant No. 2007CB310900, the Hi-Tech Research and Development Program (863) of China under Grant. 2011AA01A205, Natural Science Fund of China under grant Nos. 61202094, 61003077, 60873023, 60973029, The science and technology major project of Zhejiang Province (Grant No. 2011C11038), Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation under grant Nos. Y1101104, Y1101092, Y1090940. Zhejiang Provincial Education Department Scientific Research Project (No. Y201016492). We also thank the developer of VBS–Xiaoming Gao, who gave us much help in our work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Zhejiang, China

    Jian Wan, Jianliang Zhang, Li Zhou, Yicheng Wang, Congfeng Jiang & Yongjian Ren

  2. Supercomputing Center of Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Jue Wang

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  1. Jian Wan
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  3. Li Zhou
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Correspondence to Li Zhou.

Additional information

A previous work titled with “Optimize block-level cloud storage system with load-balance strategy” has been published in HPDIC2012 Conference. This paper is an extended version of that work.

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Wan, J., Zhang, J., Zhou, L. et al. ORTHRUS: a lightweighted block-level cloud storage system. Cluster Comput 16, 625–638 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-012-0234-7

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