Where does my data live?

Posted by Daniel Ford, Senior Mathematician

Have you ever wondered what happens when you upload a photo to Picasa, or where all your Gmail or YouTube videos are stored? How it is that you can read or watch them from anywhere at any time?

If you stored your data on a single hard disk, like the one in your personal computer, then the disk would eventually fail and your data would be lost forever. If you want to protect your data from the possibility of such a failure, you can store copies across many different disks so that if any one fails then you just access the data from another.

However, once storage systems get large enough, anything and everything can and does go wrong. You have to plan not just for disk failures but for server, network, and entire datacenter failures. Add to this software bugs and maintenance operations and you have a whole lot more failures.

Using measurements from dozens of Google data centers, we found that almost-simultaneous failure of many servers in a data center has the greatest impact on availability. On the other hand, disk failures have relatively little impact because our systems are specifically designed to cope with these failures.

Once you have a model of failures, you can also look at the impact of various design choices. Where exactly should you place your data replicas? How fast do you need recover from losing a disk or server? What encoding scheme or number of replicas of the data is enough, given a desired level of availability? For example, we found that storing data across multiple data centers reduces data unavailability by many orders of magnitude compared to having the same number of replicas in a single data center. The added complexity and potential for slower recovery times is worth it to get better availability, or use less storage space, or even both at the same time.

As you can see, something as simple as storing your photos, mail, or videos becomes a lot more involved when you want to be sure it's always available.

In our paper, Availability in Globally Distributed Storage Systems, we characterize the availability of cloud storage systems, based on extensive monitoring of Google's main storage infrastructure, and the sources of failure which affect availability. We also present statistical models for reasoning about the impact of design choices such as data placement, recovery speed, and replication strategies, including replication across multiple data centers.