Collapsing the layers: 6Stor, a scalable and IPv6-centric distributed storage system

Abstract

The exponentially growing storage demands that industry currently faces puts a huge stress on traditional distributed storage systems. Indeed, the concurrently increasing quantity of available video content and video quality comes with a new set of challenges that existing distributed systems have a hard time to meet. These difficulties are mostly the result of design decisions that, while relevant for the initial scope of those systems, end up limiting their scalability. In this paper, a quick overview of these typical design decisions is presented for two examples: Ceph and GFS (Google File System). An original and IPv6-centric architecture is then described, that presents none of the aforementioned scalability limitations, and a first prototype of this architecture is compared to Ceph.