Superset: A Non-uniform Replica Placement Strategy towards High-Performance and Cost-Effective Distributed Storage Service

Load balance and power proportionality are both important aspects in constructing high-performance and cost-effective distributed storage systems. However, traditional replica placement strategies towards load balance usually produce scattered replica layouts which disable power proportionality, while recent strategies towards power proportionality are typically based on uniform replication which compromises the ability of load balance. In this article, we introduce Superset (an organized non-uniform replica placement strategy) which takes both load balance and power proportionality into consideration. The main idea is to partition the whole system into multiple uniform replication based subsystems with the accommodated file subsets satisfying the 'superset' condition. We have conducted a series of simulations with real-world distributions of data popularity. Our results show that, compared to state of the art solutions, Superset consumes less energy to fulfill the same performance requirement while offers better performance subject to the same energy consumption constraint.