Colossus is the successor to the File (GFS) as mentioned in the recent on OSDI 2012. Colossus is also used by spanner to store its tablets. The information about Colossus is slim compared with GFS which is published in . There is still some information about Colossus on the Web. Here, I list some of them.
Storage Architecture and Challenges
On Faculty Summit, July 29, 2010, by Andrew Fikes, Principal Engineer.
. Some interesting points:
- Storage : Colossus
- Next-generation cluster-level file system
- Automatically sharded metadata layer
- Data typically written using Reed-Solomon (1.5x)
- Client-driven replication, encoding and replication
- Metadata space has enabled availability analyses
- Why Reed-Solomon?
- Cost. Especially w/ cross cluster replication.
- Field data and simulations show improved MTTF
- More flexible cost vs. availability choices
GFS: Evolution on Fast-forward
An interview with Google’s Sean Quinlan by the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM).
.
Some important info:
- “We also ended up doing what we call a “multi-cell” approach, which basically made it possible to put multiple GFS masters on top of a pool of chunkservers.”
- “We also have something we called Name Spaces, which are just a very static way of partitioning a namespace that people can use to hide all of this from the actual application.” … “a namespace file describes”
- “The distributed master certainly allows you to grow file counts, in line with the number of machines you’re willing to throw at it.” … “Our distributed master system that will provide for 1-MB files is essentially a whole new design. That way, we can aim for something on the order of 100 million files per master. You can also have hundreds of masters.”
- BitTable “as one of the major adaptations made along the way to help keep GFS viable in the face of rapid and widespread change.”
Google File System II: Dawn of the Multiplying Master Nodes Comments on GFS2 (colossus)
by Cade Metz in San Francisco.
and .