Dr. Darrell Long

OBFS: A File System for Object-Based Storage Devices

Proceedings of the Twenty-first Symposium on Mass Storage Systems (MSS)

April 2004View full paper

Abstract

The object-based storage model, in which files are made up of one or more data objects stored on self-contained Object-Based Storage Devices (OSDs), is emerging as an architecture for distributed storage systems. The workload presented to the OSDs will be quite different from that of general-purpose file systems, yet many distributed file systems employ general-purpose file systems as their underlying file system. We present OBFS, a small and highly efficient file system designed for use in OSDs. Our experiments show that our user-level implementation of OBFS outperforms Linux Ext2 and Ext3 by a factor of two or three, and while OBFS is 1/25 the size of XFS, it provides only slightly lower read performance and 10%–40% higher write performance.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{wang-mss04b,
  author       = {Feng Wang and Scott A. Brandt and Ethan L. Miller and Darrell D. E. Long},
  title        = {OBFS: A File System for Object-Based Storage Devices},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the Twenty-first Symposium on Mass Storage Systems (MSS)},
  organization = {NASA},
  address      = {Goddard, Maryland},
  pages        = {283--300},
  month        = apr,
  year         = {2004}
}
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