Wofs: A Distributed Network File System Supporting Fast Data Insertion and Truncation

Abstract

With the development of high-speed networks, people start building large distributed network file systems. Today distributed network file systems become very popular and important to human life. Meanwhile, the concept of object-based storage has been brought up and will become a main trend in the future. But most file systems still lack functions for doing fast arbitrary data insertion and truncation. To solve the problem, we present Wofs, an object-based distributed network file system which supports fast arbitrary data insertion and truncation. Wofs splits a file into many small objects, stores these objects in remote file servers, and uses a special B+tree [1][4] to manage the metadata of these objects. Besides, Wofs uses the object-range locking policy to avoid data incoherence and improve performance.