Unified Namespace and Tiered Storage in Alluxio
Calvin Jia and Jiri Simsa explain how the current Alluxio tiered storage can be easily configured to use memory, SSDs, and hard drives in different tiers. Alluxio users and administrators do not have to manually migrate the data because data in Alluxio is managed transparently between all the configured tiers, similar to the way the CPU manages L1, L2, and lower-level caches. Meanwhile, Alluxio also provides users fine-grained control of manipulating data to plug in their own data-management strategies; users can also pin files in Alluxio to a specific storage or specify a TTL to files. Calvin and Jiri also describe the interface for managing heterogeneous data sources into the Alluxio namespace, which takes advantage of Alluxio’s ability to interoperate with different underlying storage systems such as HDFS, S3, GlusterFS, or Swift.