Frangipani: A Scalable Distributed File System
Author: Chandramohan A. Thekkath, Timothy Mann, Edward K. Lee
Frangipani is a distributed file system that tries to get as close as possible to the ideal distributed file system which has the following characteristics:
- Provide all its users with coherent shared access to the same set of files
- Would be scalable to provide more storage space
- Provides higher performance to a growing user community Frangipani achieves its success by providing a very simple internal structure that enables programmers to handle system recovery, reconfiguration and load balancing with little machinery.
Here are the key contributions of the paper:
- Providing all the users with a consistent view of the same set of files
- Easy addition of more servers to an existing Frangipani installation to increate throughput and storage capacity
- Hassle free addition of new users by the system administrators without concern about which machine will store and manage the new data
- Ability by the admin to make full and consistent backup of the entire file system without bringing the node down.
- Ability to have online backups allowing users to quickly access accidentally deleted files
- A file system that can tolerate and recover from machine, network and disk failures without operator intervention.
The paper backs up its claims in the following way:
- Single Machine Performance: Frangipani was compared to Unix’s AdvFS and it was found that Frangipani had throughput of 15.3 MB/s compared to AdvFS’s 13.3 MB/s for writes and 10.3 MB/s vs 13.2 MB/s for reads. The CPU utilization for Frangipani was found to be 42% compared to AdvFS’s 80% for writes and 25% vs 50% for reads.
- Scaling: Frangipani ‘s scaling on Uncached Read was found to have negligible variation in the steady -state throughput. The scaling on write also observed little variation in the steady-state throughput during this interval.