Cassandra as a building block for a distributed object storage system
October 12, 2015
Cassandra as a building block for a distributed object storage system
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
2.0.x
Overall Satisfaction with Cassandra
Cassandra is used as a component of our HyperStore S3-compatible object storage system. Cassandra is installed on each node and provides the distributed system logic to determine how to store objects. The other components are primarily Java servers that we wrote that work in conjunction with Cassandra to provide a scalable, peer-to-peer, highly fault tolerant system.
- Performant. In particular, write performance is very good. Recently, a lot of work to address the changing systems environment has been done to take advantage of areas like SSDs and very dense storage systems.
- Distributed system logic. Multiple data centers and other common network configurations like heterogeneous nodes are handled and exploited well.
- Community. Strong community with users and project contributors worldwide. The open-source and commercial software people work well together with sharing of lessons learned and improvements based on feedback.
- Operational tools. Would like to see continued work to improve the operational capability for large clusters and large amounts of data. For example, analyzing the on-disk files.
- Repair. Being able to run repair continuously and with greater control to avoid any spikes in resource use.
- Being able to build on top of the Cassandra product is a huge advantage as compared to having to develop that functionality ourselves. Not only the initial start, but we can take advantage of continued improvements.
Cassandra is well suited to more complex networks like multiple data centers. The underlying distributed systems logic is fundamentally sound.