The Zebra Striped Network File System

John H. Hartman and John K. Ousterhout

EECS Department
University of California, Berkeley
Technical Report No. UCB/CSD-93-744
May 1993

http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1993/CSD-93-744.pdf

Zebra is a network file system that stripes file data across multiple servers for increased file throughput. Rather than striping each file separately, Zebra forms all the new data from each client into a single stream, which it then stripes. This provides high performance for reads and writes of large files and also for writes of small files. Zebra also writes parity information in each stripe in the style of RAID disk arrays; this increases storage costs slightly but allows the system to continue operation even while a single storage server is unavailable. A prototype implementation of Zebra, built in the Sprite operating system, provides 5-8 times the throughput of the standard Sprite file system or NFS.


BibTeX citation:

@techreport{Hartman:CSD-93-744,
    Author = {Hartman, John H. and Ousterhout, John K.},
    Title = {The Zebra Striped Network File System},
    Institution = {EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley},
    Year = {1993},
    Month = {May},
    URL = {http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1993/6277.html},
    Number = {UCB/CSD-93-744},
    Abstract = {Zebra is a network file system that stripes file data across multiple servers for increased file throughput. Rather than striping each file separately, Zebra forms all the new data from each client into a single stream, which it then stripes. This provides high performance for reads and writes of large files and also for writes of small files. Zebra also writes parity information in each stripe in the style of RAID disk arrays; this increases storage costs slightly but allows the system to continue operation even while a single storage server is unavailable. A prototype implementation of Zebra, built in the Sprite operating system, provides 5-8 times the throughput of the standard Sprite file system or NFS.}
}

EndNote citation:

%0 Report
%A Hartman, John H.
%A Ousterhout, John K.
%T The Zebra Striped Network File System
%I EECS Department, University of California, Berkeley
%D 1993
%@ UCB/CSD-93-744
%U http://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1993/6277.html
%F Hartman:CSD-93-744