Modern data-intensive applications increasingly demand efficient and scalable file systems that can operate across distributed and cross-domain environments. However, existing file systems are inefficient in metadata management, synchronization efficiency, and system scalability under high-concurrency and metadata-intensive workloads in cross-domain environments. To address these challenges, this article introduces CrossFS (CFS), a cross-domain distributed file system that enhances consistency guarantees and metadata indexing. Specifically, CFS leverages conflict-free replicated data types (CRDTs) to synchronize metadata, achieving strong eventual consistency with minimal synchronization overhead, even across network partitions. Furthermore, CFS employs a Hybrid Tree indexing structure, tailored for distributed environments, which optimizes metadata operations by reducing query latency by up to 33.4% and write amplification by 30.7%. Additionally, CFS achieves adaptive caching strategies and a hybrid synchronization model that effectively balances consistency latency with data availability. Extensive evaluations show that CFS outperforms CephFS and GlusterFS, achieving up to 33.9% higher metadata throughput, 36% lower latency, and 42% better data operation efficiency.

Traditional local disk file systems like Ext4, XFS, and Btrfs excel in managing file data but struggle with metadata-intensive workloads and small file accesses, especially across distributed and cross-domain environments.In this paper, we present CrossFS (CFS), a new cross-domain file system designed to overcome these challenges.CrossFS leverages Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs) for efficient metadata synchronization and merging, enhancing both performance and consistency across systems.We organize metadata into a single sparse table using a Log-Structured Merge Tree (LSMT), minimizing metadata overhead and optimizing access efficiency.Additionally, by stacking another local file system as an object store, our system ensures efficient large file allocation and access, while preserving local performance through FUSE integration and rest rpc framework, for cross-regional capabilities.Experimental evaluations demonstrate significant performance enhancements over existing solutions, with our system achieving up to 2× the performance of traditional local file systems and a 40% improvement over distributed systems.

Object storage has been widely used in the cloud. Traditionally, the size of object metadata is much smaller than that of object data, and thus existing object storage systems (such as Ceph and Oasis) can place object data and metadata, respectively, on hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs) to achieve high I/O performance at a low monetary cost. Currently, however, a wide range of cloud applications organize their data as large numbers of small objects of which the data size is close to (or even smaller than) the metadata size, thus greatly increasing the cost if placing all metadata on expensive SSDs. This article presents x Meta , an SSD-HDD-hybrid optimization for metadata maintenance of cloud-scale object storage. We observed that a substantial portion of the metadata of small objects is rarely accessed and thus can be stored on HDDs with little performance penalty. Therefore, x Meta first classifies the hot and cold metadata based on the frequency of metadata accesses of upper-layer applications and then adaptively stores the hot metadata on SSDs and the cold metadata on HDDs. We also propose a merging mechanism for hot metadata to further improve the efficiency of SSD storage and optimize range key query and insertion for hot metadata by designing composite keys. We have integrated the x Meta metadata service with Ceph to realize a high-performance, low-cost object store (called xCeph). The extensive evaluation shows that xCeph outperforms the original Ceph by an order of magnitude in the space requirement of SSD storage, while improving the throughput by up to 2.7×.

Object-based storage systems have been widely used for various scenarios such as file storage, block storage, blob (e.g., large videos) storage, and so on, where the data is placed among a large number of object storage devices (OSDs). Data placement is critical for the scalability of decentralized object-based storage systems. The state-of-the-art CRUSH placement method is a decentralized algorithm that deterministically places object replicas onto storage devices without relying on a central directory. While enjoying the benefits of decentralization such as high scalability, robustness, and performance, CRUSH-based storage systems suffer from uncontrolled data migration when expanding the capacity of the storage clusters (i.e., adding new OSDs), which is determined by the nature of CRUSH and will cause significant performance degradation when the expansion is nontrivial. This article presents MapX , a novel extension to CRUSH that uses an extra time-dimension mapping (from object creation times to cluster expansion times) for controlling data migration after cluster expansions. Each expansion is viewed as a new layer of the CRUSH map represented by a virtual node beneath the CRUSH root. MapX controls the mapping from objects onto layers by manipulating the timestamps of the intermediate placement groups (PGs). MapX is applicable to a large variety of object-based storage scenarios where object timestamps can be maintained as higher-level metadata. We have applied MapX to the state-of-the-art Ceph-RBD (RADOS Block Device) to implement a migration-controllable, decentralized object-based block store (called Oasis ). Oasis extends the RBD metadata structure to maintain and retrieve approximate object creation times (for migration control) at the granularity of expansion layers. Experimental results show that the MapX -based Oasis block store outperforms the CRUSH-based Ceph-RBD (which is busy in migrating objects after expansions) by 3.17× ∼ 4.31× in tail latency, and 76.3% (respectively, 83.8%) in IOPS for reads (respectively, writes).