Redundant Array of Independent Filesystems

http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu
Posted by wensong 1586 days ago



Using the fan-out infrastructure we have, we are developing a file system that has the same redundancy characteristics of RAID, but at the VFS level. We call this Redundant Arrays of Independent Filesystems (RAIF). RAIF support includes striping (RAIF0), mirroring (RAIF1), parity (RAIF5 and RAIF6), and other modes. RAIF allows redundancy and performance increases on many types of file systems, including NFS. The RAIF logic is at the VFS layer, so file-level knowledge is used to decide on the right level of redundancy that best matches the value of the file in question. Moreover, recovery from failures can be done on a per file basis instead of the whole disk drive; this means that if a recovery failed mid-way, it can be resumed without having to restart the entire disk device's recovery.

The project was started in April 2004 in Filesystems and Storage Laboratory of Stony Brook University. RAIF can be compiled as an external Linux loadable kernel module for a wide range of Linux kernel versions.

 

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