2018-05-29

Title: Elasticity in Distributed File Systems.

Speaker: Cyril Seguin

Abstract: Since about several decades, distributed file systems are more an more used as a storage solution for distributed infrastructures.
They offer efficient, reliable and easy access to huge amounts of shared data by federating several storage resources and by replicating each data across these resources.
In parallel, the advent of cloud computing platforms, and especially infrastructure as a service platforms that punctually offer to users thousand of resources on demand, allows to acquire inexpensive distributed infrastructures.
Elasticity and pay per use cloud’s characteristics allow users to dynamically extend or reduce the number of used resources according their needs, paying exactly what they use.
Deploying a distributed file system on a cloud computing platform can offer to users the possibility to adapt the number of used resources to the platform activity while taking advantage of a distributed file system’s performance.
However, new challenges are raised concerning data availability and the trade-off between number of used resources and performance.
This talk focuses on solving these issues respectively in a static and dynamic context in which the platform activity is respectively known or not.
We show that bringing new data placement strategies and adapting the number of replicas of each data to its access frequency and balancing the requests load on each used resource allow to answer to the previous issues.