A Data Rebalancing Mechanism for Gluster File System

Abstract

Data rebalancing is one of the most interesting research areas in distributed file systems. In Gluster file system, data among the storage servers are rebalanced after adding a new storage server to the Gluster storage pool or removing the storage server from the Gluster storage pool. The main issue in Gluster file system is inefficient data rebalancing; a large number of file migrations, a large amount of files migration time and inefficient storage utilization. Therefore, a data rebalancing mechanism for Gluster file system is proposed to achieve efficient storage utilization, to reduce the number of file migrations and to save files migration time. There are two main contributions in this paper: using consistent hashing algorithm with virtual nodes from Amazon dynamo to reduce the number of file migrations and to save files migration time and migration of virtual nodes between storage servers to provide efficient storage utilization. The proposed data rebalancing mechanism and current data rebalancing mechanism are simulated with Java and the proposed mechanism provides 82% (fullness percent), 20% of the number of file migrations, 20% of the files migration time, and 73% of the number of required storage servers of the current mechanism of Gluster file system.