A Compression Technique Exploiting References for Data Synchronization Services

Department of Computer Science and EngineeringIn a variety of network applications, there exists significant amount of shared data between two end hosts. Examples include data synchronization services that replicate data from one node to another. Given that shared data may have high correlation with new data to transmit, we question how such shared data can be best utilized to improve the efficiency of data transmission. To answer this, we develop an encoding technique, SyncCoding, that effectively replaces bit sequences of the data to be transmitted with the pointers to their matching bit sequences in the shared data so called references. By doing so, SyncCoding can reduce data traffic, speed up data transmission, and save energy consumption for transmission. Our evaluations of SyncCoding implemented in Linux show that it outperforms existing popular encoding techniques, Brotli, LZMA, Deflate, and Deduplication. The gains of SyncCoding over those techniques in the perspective of data size after compression in a cloud storage scenario are about 12.4%, 20.1%, 29.9%, and 61.2%, and are about 78.3%, 79.6%, 86.1%, and 92.9% in a web browsing scenario, respectively.ope

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