GFCache: A Greedy Failure Cache Considering Failure Recency and Failure Frequency for an Erasure-Coded Storage System

In the big data era, data unavailability, either temporary or permanent, becomes a normal occurrence on a daily basis. Unlike the permanent data failure, which is fixed through a background job, temporarily unavailable data is recovered on-the-fly to serve the ongoing read request. However, those newly revived data is discarded after serving the request, due to the assumption that data experiencing temporary failures could come back alive later. Such disposal of failure data prevents the sharing of failure information among clients, and leads to many unnecessary data recovery processes, (e.g. caused by either recurring unavailability of a data or multiple data failures in one stripe), thereby straining system performance.
To this end, this paper proposes GFCache to cache corrupted data for the dual purposes of failure information sharing and eliminating unnecessary data recovery processes. GFCache employs a greedy caching approach of opportunism to promote not only the failed data, but also sequential failure-likely data in the same stripe. Additionally, GFCache includes a FARC (Failure ARC) catch replacement algorithm, which features a balanced consideration of failure recency, frequency to accommodate data corruption with good hit ratio. The stored data in GFCache is able to support fast read of the normal data access. Furthermore, since GFCache is a generic failure cache, it can be used anywhere erasure coding is deployed with any specific coding schemes and parameters. Evaluations show that GFCache achieves good hit ratio with our sophisticated caching algorithm and manages to significantly boost system performance by reducing unnecessary data recoveries with vulnerable data in the cache.