ECStor: A Flexible Enterprise-Oriented Cloud Storage System Based on GlusterFS

With the rapid development of information technology, enormous volumes of data is being generated by many enterprises at all times. A reasonable storage of these large scale data to reduce cost and achieve internal data sharing and collaboration has always been a challenge for enterprises. Cloud storage technology, as an important branch in the field of cloud computing, is becoming a trend to solve this problem. At present, there have been some works on cloud storage, but most of them focus on individual users. Even if there are a few enterprise level products, they still cannot meet the actual needs of enterprises. To address these problems, in this paper, we propose a flexible enterprise-oriented cloud storage system (ECStor) based on GlusterFS. ECStor provides a directory-level fine-grained access control solution, so that storage space can be allocated flexibly according to different role of users or IP addresses. Meanwhile, we achieved a load balancer to distribute user load to NFS servers on different storage nodes, and also implemented a friendly management system interface based on B/S architecture. Finally, we provide an easy-to-use client-side software on Windows platform. We deployed ECStor to the data center, and evaluated the performance of LIST and load balance and found that the latency of LIST acted out no significant losses compared with the original GlusterFS, and achieved a good load balance.