Fatman: Building Reliable Archival Storage Based on Low-Cost Volunteer Resources

We present Fatman, an enterprise-scale archival storage based on volunteer contribution resources from under-utilized web servers, usually deployed on thousands of nodes with spare storage capacity. Fatman is specifically designed for enhancing the utilization of existing storage resources and cutting down the hardware purchase cost. Two major concerned issues of the system design are maximizing the resource utilization of volunteer nodes without violating service level objectives (SLOs) and minimizing the cost without reducing the availability of archival system. Fatman has been widely deployed on tens of thousands of server nodes across several datacenters, providing more than 100 PB storage capacity and serving dozens of internal mass-data applications. The system realizes an efficient storage quota consolidation by strong isolation and budget limitation, to maximally support resource contribution without any degradation on host-level SLOs. It novelly improves data reliability by applying disk failure prediction to minish failure recovery cost, named fault-aware data management, dramatically reduces the mean time to repair (MTTR) by 76.3% and decreases file crash ratio by 35% on real-life product workload.