Treffer: Load Control in Scalable Distributed File Structures

The paper presents a family of distributed file structures, coined DiFS, for record structured, disk resident files with key based exact or interval match access. The file is organized into buckets that are spread among multiple servers, where a server may hold several buckets. Client requests are serviced by mapping keys onto buckets and looking up the corresponding server in an address table. Dynamic growth, in terms of file size and access load, is supported by bucket splits and bucket migrations onto the existing or newly created servers. The major problem that we are addressing is achieving scalability in the sense that both the file size and the client throughput can be scaled up by linearly increasing the number of servers and dynamically redistributing the data. Unlike previous work with similar objectives, our data redistribution considers explicitly the cost/performance ratio of the system by aiming to minimize the number of servers that are used to provide the required perfo.