ZoneFS: Stripe remodeling in cloud data centers

Cloud data centers will contain tens of thousands of servers with massive aggregate bandwidth requirements for generating, accessing, and analyzing immense amounts of data. The I/O requirements of the myriad applications that these data centers must support run the gamut from extreme IOPS intensive to extreme bandwidth intensive. Delivering high performance with unreliable commodity hardware for this range of workloads is truly a grand challenge. ZoneFS is a parallel file system that targets cloud data center infrastructures built up of commodity network switches. ZoneFS employs a highly-available and flexible storage architecture that divides a cluster switch hierarchy into zones and stripes data across servers and disks to maximize aggregate I/O throughput and avoid storage server hotspots. In this paper, we present the overall design and implementation of ZoneFS and evaluate its key features with several cloud computing workloads. Our experimental results show that ZoneFS can improve application runtime performance by up to 76% over standard parallel file systems and by up to 85% over Internet-scale file systems.