A Robust Fault-Tolerant and Scalable Cluster-wide Deduplication for Shared-Nothing Storage Systems

Deduplication has been largely employed in distributed storage systems to improve space efficiency. Traditional deduplication research ignores the design specifications of shared-nothing distributed storage systems such as no central metadata bottleneck, scalability, and storage rebalancing. Further, deduplication introduces transactional changes, which are prone to errors in the event of a system failure, resulting in inconsistencies in data and deduplication metadata. In this paper, we propose a robust, fault-tolerant and scalable cluster-wide deduplication that can eliminate duplicate copies across the cluster. We design a distributed deduplication metadata shard which guarantees performance scalability while preserving the design constraints of shared- nothing storage systems. The placement of chunks and deduplication metadata is made cluster-wide based on the content fingerprint of chunks. To ensure transactional consistency and garbage identification, we employ a flag-based asynchronous consistency mechanism. We implement the proposed deduplication on Ceph. The evaluation shows high disk-space savings with minimal performance degradation as well as high robustness in the event of sudden server failure.Comment: 6 Pages including reference

An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Deduplication

Deduplication finds and removes long-range data duplicates. It is commonly used in cloud and enterprise server settings and has been successfully applied to primary, backup, and archival storage. Despite its practical importance as a source-coding technique, its analysis from the point of view of information theory is missing. This paper provides such an information-theoretic analysis of data deduplication. It introduces a new source model adapted to the deduplication setting. It formalizes the two standard fixed-length and variable-length deduplication schemes, and it introduces a novel multi-chunk deduplication scheme. It then provides an analysis of these three deduplication variants, emphasizing the importance of boundary synchronization between source blocks and deduplication chunks. In particular, under fairly mild assumptions, the proposed multi-chunk deduplication scheme is shown to be order optimal.Comment: 27 page