Scalable Archival Data and Metadata Management in Object-based File Systems

Online archival capabilities like snapshots or checkpoints are fast becoming an essential component of robust storage systems. Emerging large distributed file systems are also shifting to object-based storage architectures that decouple metadata from file I/O operations. As the size of such systems scale to petabytes of storage, it is critically important that file system features continue to operate efficiently. We present a flexible mechanism for archiving file system state that allows the creation of checkpoints for arbitrarily sized subtrees of the hierarchy. Checkpoints are managed in a distributed fashion while maintaining efficient utilization of system resources.