Snapshots for Ibrix - Highly Distributed Segmented Parallel FS

This presentation explores designing ‘native snapshots’ for scale-out segmented parallel file systems (Ibrix). An appropriate model of snapshots requires flexibility and fluidity to allow easy selection of objects, reliability to assure logical unity of such subsets. We scale linearly adding servers and segments fundamentally by limiting the number of objects participating in operations and de-centralizing control over meta-data. With snapshots, associated state transition has to affect not only directly referenced objects, but has to be immediately propagated to all the descendant nodes controlled by a large number of other servers. We also look into recovery, achieving quick rollback logically resetting state of the subspace to a desired point in time and allowing corresponding longer running cleanup processes to finish in the background.

Learning Objectives

Expose fundamentals of highly distributed segmented parallel file system architecture
Review the challenges of implementing snapshots for such environment
Define Snap Identities as dynamically inheritable attributes
Logical preservation of name components in snapshots and Avoid large scale data flushes at snap time