Ceph: A Scalable, High-Performance Distributed File System

by S. Weil et al., OSDI 2006.

Abstract:
We have developed Ceph, a distributed file system that provides excellent performance, reliability, and scalability. Ceph maximizes the separation between data and metadata management by replacing allocation ta- bles with a pseudo-random data distribution function (CRUSH) designed for heterogeneous and dynamic clus- ters of unreliable object storage devices (OSDs). We leverage device intelligence by distributing data replica- tion, failure detection and recovery to semi-autonomous OSDs running a specialized local object file system. A dynamic distributed metadata cluster provides extremely efficient metadata management and seamlessly adapts to a wide range of general purpose and scientific comput- ing file system workloads. Performance measurements under a variety of workloads show that Ceph has excellent I/O performance and scalable metadata manage- ment, supporting more than 250,000 metadata operations per second.

Link to the full paper:
http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/faculty/tkosar/cse710_spring13/papers/ceph.pdf