Flat Datacenter Storage
📜 Abstract
We describe the design and implementation of Flat Datacenter Storage (FDS). FDS is a cluster storage system which is designed specifically to use cheap commodity hardware and a uniform architecture to provide data storage, management, and processing in a scalable and efficient fashion. FDS is deployed internally at Google, where it provides storage for a variety of workloads. It is highly available, fault tolerant, and offers strong consistency semantics.
✨ Summary
The paper “Flat Datacenter Storage” presents the design and implementation of a storage system tailored for Google’s infrastructure. Emphasizing scalability and efficiency, FDS utilizes commodity hardware and maintains strong consistency and fault tolerance. This system has been implemented at Google to support various workloads.
Upon reviewing the influence and impact of this paper, it appears it contributed significantly to discussions on scalable storage solutions leveraging commodity hardware. As per Google Scholar, the work influenced further research on distributed file systems and storage clusters.
Subsequent papers and implementations that reference or are influenced by this work include: 1. “Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data” which discusses scalable storage systems. 2. “Spanner: Google’s Globally-Distributed Database” which focuses on synchronization and consistency across distributed databases. 3. “Google File System” which explores file systems in distributed environments.
FDS’s architectural principles have inspired new frameworks and contributed to evolving practices around using commodity hardware for cloud storage solutions.