On the trade-off between performance and storage efficiency of replication-based object storage

Abstract

The object storage systems are used to store and manage unstructured data. Most object storage systems provide the replication policy (REP) or erasure code policy (EC) to ensure the reliability and availability of data. In this paper, we study the trade-off between performance and storage efficiency of these policies with respect to different data sizes of user requests. To this end, we present a hybrid policy management system that takes advantage of both policies by automatically changing policy based on data size. We have implemented the hybrid system in OpenStack Swift. Our evaluation results show the throughput of GET request increases up to 36% while improving storage efficiency by up to 53% compared to that using the REP policy.