DLBS: Duplex Loading Balancing Strategy on Object Storage System

Typical load balancing strategies have been proved to be effective in traditional storage system in that they succeeded in providing specific algorithms on data partition and workload distribution. When comes to OBS, an object based storage system, most of these strategies are hard to comply with the new feature- a smarter storage device named object storage device (OSD) that is capable of expanding with upper burden to release the storage aware jobs from distributed file systems. While more intelligent and powerful functions begin to be deployed on the OSD, such as replication technology, which was widely adopted by modern distributed storage systems, however, its misuse will lead to the downgrade on network bandwidth and computing performance. So load balance within replica technique emerges as a hot issue in nowadays storage application. In this paper, we propose a replica-based duplex load balancing strategy (DLBS) to better load balancing. In general, DLBS is a dynamic combination of an active strategy working on replica reproduction control, and another passive strategy that supervises hot-spot appearance, transfering control as well. The model puts them together in handling load balance influenced by replicas. Theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that DLBS can be utilized in the real OBS system to provide more effective and efficient load balance than other methods.