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

Design of an Exact Data Deduplication Cluster

Abstract—Data deduplication is an important component of enterprise storage environments. The throughput and capacity limitations of single node solutions have led to the development of clustered deduplication systems. Most implemented clustered inline solutions are trading deduplication ratio versus performance and are willing to miss opportunities to detect redundant data, which a single node system would detect. We present an inline deduplication cluster with a joint distributed chunk index, which is able to detect as much redundancy as a single node solution. The use of locality and load balancing paradigms enables the nodes to minimize information exchange. Therefore, we are able to show that, despite different claims in previous papers, it is possible to combine exact deduplication, small chunk sizes, and scalability within one environment using only a commodity GBit Ethernet interconnect. Additionally, we investigate the throughput and scalability limitations with a special focus on the intra-node communication. I