PPMS: A Peer to Peer Metadata Management Strategy for Distributed File Systems

Abstract : Distributed file system is one of the key blocks of cloud computing systems. With the fast increase of user scale and data amount, metadata management has become a crucial point affecting the overall performance of a distributed file system. In this paper, we design and implement PPMS, a novel metadata management strategy in a peer to peer way. Different from existing metadata management methods, we adopt a two layer structure to achieve high scalability and low latency. The upper layer is metadata index server, which is used to store metadata of directories, while the lower layer consists of metadata servers to store the metadata of files. More importantly, the lower layer is organized in a peer to peer way to further improve scalability. We implement a prototype file system based on PPMS and evaluate its performance via experiments. The results show that our design can achieve high performance with in terms of time latency and system throughput.