Abstract
File system is the very crucial part of all computer systems. It has been improved
from local to network and now to distributed file systems. NFS, SAN, and NAS are
becoming obsolete as they all pursue the traditional block based storage systems
and impose the whole work on a single server. The recently innovated DFSs pursue
object-based storage system which helps them to decouple metadata from actual
data and hence avoid single point of failure and increase performance, scalability,
and reliability.
The recently added to Linux DFSs family is a POSIX compatible software called
Ceph. It has developed and implemented some special concepts and unique features
in its architecture (dynamic metadata subtree partitioning, intelligent objectbased
storage, data replication across nodes, fault tolerance, assuming nodes failure
as a norm rather than exception etc). This research paper investigates and evaluates
the author’s claim that ceph is capable of handling more than petabyte-scale of
storage in heterogeneous systems with excellent performance, high scalability and
high reliability