Blue Ocean Storage System (BOSS): Architecture, Advantages, and Features
System Architecture
The Blue Ocean Storage System (BOSS), developed by Xiaoyun Technology, is a next-generation scalable high-performance storage solution designed for the data era. It combines centerless distributed storage with centralized management, enabling seamless massive scalability and operational simplicity. The system architecture comprises:
Metadata Management Server: Orchestrates global metadata operations.
Data Storage Servers: Handle data persistence and replication.
Clients: Provide protocol-specific access (e.g., block, file, object).
Protocol Gateways: Support NFS, SMB, S3, and iSCSI interfaces.
Components can be deployed either on dedicated servers or co-located on the same hardware, offering flexible deployment options.
Core Advantages & Features
High Reliability
Multi-Copy Strong Consistency:
Data is replicated across nodes/racks with disk/node/rack-level fault tolerance.
Proprietary cache management ensures data is flushed to disk immediately, preventing loss during power failures.
Multi-Tier Data Recovery:
Real-time副本验证 during I/O operations with automated repair of corrupted replicas.
Periodic disk health checks and isolated failed disks with distributed data reconstruction.
System-wide consistency checks and adaptive repair rates that adjust to I/O loads.
High Performance
Full-Stack Optimization:
End-to-end tuning of communication protocols, encoding/decoding, cache algorithms, I/O scheduling, event-driven concurrency, and zero-copy buffer management.
Benchmarks: Achieves 3–10× higher IOPS than open-source Ceph, with 1.4 million random IOPS in 4-node configurations (each node equipped with PCIe SSD and 10GbE bonding).
Seamless Scalability
Centerless Architecture: Eliminates metadata server bottlenecks, enabling scaling to 1,000+ nodes.
Storage Pool Isolation: Multiple pools support dynamic capacity expansion without downtime.
Automatic Data Rebalancing: Post-expansion data distribution ensures linear performance scaling.
Unified Storage
Multi-Protocol Support: Simultaneously serves block, file, and object storage from a single platform.
Application-Specific QoS: Tailors redundancy policies and performance SLAs for virtualization, databases, big data analytics, and more.
Simplified Operations
One-Click Deployment: Rapid cluster initialization via a web-based interface.
Comprehensive Monitoring:
Real-time dashboards for cluster/pool/node/disk utilization and performance.
1-Year Historical Data Retention: Aids in workload analysis and troubleshooting.
Non-Disruptive Upgrades: Online hardware refresh with automated data migration.
Billion-Scale File Management
NoSQL-Based Metadata Engine: Enables tag-based file searches and directory operations at scale.
Small File Coalescing: Aggregates millions of small files into large containers, reducing metadata overhead by 99.9% and supporting 10 billion+ file management.
Use Case: Medical PACS Storage
Challenge: Storing and retrieving 100+ million DICOM files (each <1MB) with sub-second latency.
Solution: BOSS’s small file optimization and metadata acceleration reduce image access times by 80% compared to legacy SAN/NAS.
