Distributed file organization with scalable cost/performance

Abstract

This paper presents a distributed file organization for record-structured, disk-resident files with key-based exact-match access. The file is organized into buckets that are spread across multiple servers, where a server may hold multiple buckets. Client requests are serviced by mapping keys onto buckets and looking up the corresponding server in an address table. Dynamic growth in terms of file size and access load is supported by bucket splits and migration onto other existing or newly acquired servers.