OBFS: A File System for Object-Based Storage Devices

Appeared in Proceedings of the 21st IEEE / 12th NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies.

Abstract

The object-based storage model, in which files are made up of one or more data objects stored on self-contained Object-Based Storage Devices (OSDs), is emerging as an architecture for distributed storage systems. The workload presented to the OSDs will be quite different from that of general-purpose file systems, yet many distributed file systems employ general-purpose file systems as their underlying file system. We present OBFS, a small and highly efficient file system designed for use in OSDs. Our experiments show that our user-level implementation of OBFS outperforms Linux Ext2 and Ext3 by a factor of two or three, and while OBFS is 1/25 the size of XFS, it provides only slightly lower read performance and 10%–40% higher write performance.

Publication date:
April 2004

Authors:
Feng Wang
Scott A. Brandt
Ethan L. Miller
Darrell D. E. Long

Projects:
Ultra-Large Scale Storage

Available media

Full paper text: PDF

Bibtex entry

@inproceedings{wang-msst04a,
  author       = {Feng Wang and Scott A. Brandt and Ethan L. Miller and Darrell D. E. Long},
  title        = {{OBFS}: A File System for Object-Based Storage Devices},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings of the 21st IEEE / 12th NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies},
  pages        = {283-300},
  month        = apr,
  year         = {2004},
}