2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference Abstract
Pp. 57–70 of the Proceedings
Thresher: An Efficient Storage Manager for Copy-on-write Snapshots
Liuba Shrira and Hao Xu, Brandeis University
Abstract
A new generation of storage systems exploit decreasing storage costs
to allow applications to take
snapshots of past states and retain them for long durations.
Over time, current snapshot techniques can produce large volumes of snapshots.
Indiscriminately keeping all snapshots accessible is impractical,
even if raw disk storage is cheap,
because administering such large-volume storage is expensive over a long duration.
Moreover, not all snapshots are equally valuable.
Thresher is a new snapshot storage management system,
based on novel copy-on-write snapshot techniques,
that is the first to provide applications the ability to discriminate
among snapshots efficiently.
Valuable snapshots can remain
accessible or stored with faster access
while less valuable snapshots are
discarded or moved off-line.
Measurements of the Thresher prototype indicate that the new techniques are efficient and
scalable,
imposing minimal ( )
performance penalty on expected common workloads.
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