Building a high-performance deduplication system

• Authors: Fanglu Guo;Petros Efstathopoulos
• Venue: USENIXATC'11 Proceedings of the 2011 USENIX conference on USENIX annual technical conference
• Year: 2011

Modern deduplication has become quite effective at eliminating duplicates in data, thus multiplying the effective capacity of disk-based backup systems, and enabling them as realistic tape replacements. Despite these improvements, single-node raw capacity is still mostly limited to tens or a few hundreds of terabytes, forcing users to resort to complex and costly multi-node systems, which usually only allow them to scale to singledigit petabytes. As the opportunities for deduplication efficiency optimizations become scarce, we are challenged with the task of designing deduplication systems that will effectively address the capacity, throughput, management and energy requirements of the petascale age. In this paper we present our high-performance deduplication prototype, designed from the ground up to optimize overall single-node performance, by making the best possible use of a node's resources, and achieve three important goals: scale to large capacity, provide good deduplication efficiency, and near-raw-disk throughput. Instead of trying to improve duplicate detection algorithms, we focus on system design aspects and introduce novelmechanisms--thatwe combinewith careful implementations of known system engineering techniques. In particular, we improve single-node scalability by introducing progressive sampled indexing and grouped mark-and-sweep, and also optimize throughput by utilizing an event-driven, multi-threaded client-server interaction model. Our prototype implementation is able to scale to billions of stored objects, with high throughput, and very little or no degradation of deduplication efficiency.