Various embodiments of the invention relate to the technology of storage, and more specifically, to disk management in a distributed storage system.
The widely adopted object storage technology has generated massive applications using commercial disk drives in cloud, social network and mobile internet areas, some of which generate billions of photos per day. Enterprises are gradually adopting commercial disks to store critical data such as scanned images, audio/video recording, etc. To avoid data lost in case of disk failures, replication of target data is commonly used to store multiple copies of the target data onto different disks that are physically separated by nodes, racks, or sites. In order to achieve higher performance and higher availability, more commercial disks are used to store data in a highly distributed way for both the data and its replication.
The increase of disk consumption has already created heavy power consumption issues for many internet companies. This is especially challenging as applications require keeping all object data on disks for fast access and for longer retention regardless of whether the target data is on a spinning disk or is accessed once every few years.