Elastic Replication on the Metadata in Object-Based Storage Systems

The operations of the metadata account for more than half of the load in the object-based storage system, while the replication strategy can improve the performance. Therefore, an elastic replication strategy is proposed in this paper, which is based on the communication model consisting of the physical nodes and logical elements in the object-based storage system. The replication environment is formalized and the hot degree of the metadata is defined. Afterwards, based on the capability of the metadata server (MDS), the metadata is adaptively replicated across the MDS cluster according to the access frequency of the corresponding data object, including the numbers of the replications and their storage locations. Through analysis and evaluation, it is proved that the replication strategy can improve the service efficiency of the metadata in the object-based storage system, which can further improve the performance of the system.