The State of the Art of Metadata Managements in Large-Scale Distributed File Systems - Scalability, Performance and Availability

Hao Dai, Yang Wang, Kenneth B. Kent, Lingfang Zeng, Cheng-Zhong Xu

Abstract: File system metadata is the data in charge of maintaining namespace, permission semantics and location of file data blocks. Operations on the metadata can account for up to 80% of total file system operations. As such, the performance of metadata services significantly impacts the overall performance of file systems. A large-scale distributed file system (DFS) is a storage system that is composed of multiple storage devices spreading across different sites to accommodate data files, and in most cases, to provide users with location independent access interfaces. Large-scale DFSs have been widely deployed as a substrate to a plethora of computing systems, and thus their metadata management efficiency is crucial to a massive number of applications, especially with the advent of the Big Data age, which poses tremendous pressure on underlying storage systems. This paper reports the state-of-the-art research on metadata services in large-scale distributed file systems, which is conducted from three indicative perspectives that are always used to characterize DFSs: high-scalability, high-performance, and high-availability, with special focus on their respective major challenges as well as their developed mainstream technologies. Additionally, the paper also identifies and analyzes several existing problems in the research, which could be used as a reference for related studies.