FS2You: Peer-Assisted Semi-Persistent Online Storage at a Large Scale

Abstract

Abstract-It has been widely acknowledged that online storage systems within the "cloud" of the Internet provide services of a substantial value to end users who wish to share files of any sizes within a group. Such online storage services are typically provided by dedicated servers, either in content distribution networks (CDNs) or large data centers. Server bandwidth costs, however, are prohibitive in these cases, especially when serving large volumes of files to a large number of users. Though it seems intuitive to take advantage of peer upload bandwidth to mitigate such server bandwidth costs in a complementary fashion, it is not trivial to design and fine-tune important aspects of such peerassisted online storage in a real-world large-scale deployment.This paper presents FS2You, a large-scale and real-world online storage system with peer assistance and semi-persistent file availability, in order to dramatically mitigate server bandwidth costs. In this paper, we show a number of challenges involved in such a design objective, our architectural and protocol design in response to these challenges, as well as an extensive measurement study at a large scale to demonstrate the effectiveness of our design, using real-world traces that we have collected. To our knowledge, this paper represents the first attempt to design, implement, and evaluate a new peer-assisted semi-persistent online storage system at a realistic scale. Since the launch of FS2You, it has quickly become one of the most popular online storage systems in mainland China, and a favorite in many online forums across the country.

Survey of Cloud-Based Content Sharing Research: Taxonomy of System Models and Case Examples

“…FS2You [63] is a peer-assisted semi-persistent online storage system. Generally, P2P file sharing systems do not provide guarantees on shared file availability, while server-based online storage system can make such guarantees at the prohibitive cost of server bandwidth and storage.…”

“…The design objective of FS2You is to achieve a reasonable and balanced tradeoff between these extreme system models. Although there is no clear description, the servers forming FS2You (i.e., "online storage" stated in [63]) seem to be a cloud system or something similar. Figure 13 illustrates the hybrid system architecture of FS2You.…”

Replica Placement in Peer-Assisted Clouds: An Economic Approach

“…In [3], a peer-assisted cloud storage system deployed in china is introduced. The authors describe the system design and show some measurements.…”

Using Torrent Inflation to Efficiently Serve the Long Tail in Peer-Assisted Content Delivery Systems

“…However, to the best of our knowledge, the only previous work on server scheduling in multi-torrent file download systems is that by Sun et al [16,17]. They use an analytic steady-state fluid-style model to compare the performance of equal server bandwidth allocation among all peers, and equal server bandwidth allocation among all files, with an analytic lower bound [16].…”

“…They use an analytic steady-state fluid-style model to compare the performance of equal server bandwidth allocation among all peers, and equal server bandwidth allocation among all files, with an analytic lower bound [16]. A version of the second of these policies has been implemented in FS2You [17]. We note that these two policies are very similar to the baseline server scheduling policies discussed in Section 3.…”