Scalable network file systems with load balancing and fault tolerance for web services

Abstract Because of the rapid growth of the World Wide Web and the popularization of smart phones, tablets and personal computers, the number of web service users is increasing rapidly. As a result, large web services require additional disk space, and the required disk space increases with the number of web service users. Therefore, it is important to design and implement a powerful network file system for large web service providers. In this paper, we present three design issues for scalable network file systems. We use a variable number of objects within a bucket to decrease internal fragmentation in small files. We also propose a free space and access load-balancing mechanism to balance overall loading on the bucket servers. Finally, we propose a mechanism for caching frequently accessed data to lower the total disk I/O. These proposed mechanisms can effectively improve scalable network file system performance for large web services.