A New Approach to Double I/O Performance for Ceph Distributed File System in Cloud Computing

Block storage resources are essential in an Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS) cloud computing system. It is used for storing virtual machines’ images. It offers persistent storage service even the virtual machine is off. Distribute storage systems are used to provide block storage services in IaaS, such as Amazon EBS, Cinder, Ceph, Sheepdog. Ceph is widely used as the backend block storage service of OpenStack platform. It converts block devices into objects with the same size and saves them on the local file system. The performance of block devices provided by Ceph is only 30% of hard disks in many cases. One of the key issues that affect the performance of Ceph is the three replicas for fault tolerance. But our research finds that replicas are not the real reason slow down the performance. In this paper, we present a new approach to accelerate the IO operations. The experiment results show that by using our storage engine, Ceph can offer faster IO performance than the hard disk in most cases. Our new storage engine provides more than three times up than the original one.