SNAP: a Non-disruptive Snapshot System

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``SNAP: a Non-disruptive Snapshot System" by Liuba Shrira, and Hao Xu. In Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE) (ICDE), (Tokyo, Japan), April 2005.

Abstract

SNAP is a novel high-performance snapshot system for object storage systems. The goal is to provide a snapshot service that is efficient enough to permit "back-in-time" read-only activities to run against application-specified snapshots. Such activities are often impossible to run against rapidly evolving current state because of interference or because the required activity is determined in retrospect. A key innovation in SNAP is that it provides snapshots that are transactionally consistent, yet non-disruptive. Unlike earlier systems, we use novel in-memory data structures to ensure that frequent snapshots do not block applications from accessing the storage system, and do not cause unnecessary disk operations. We have implemented a SNAP prototype and analyzed its performance. Preliminary results show that providing snapshots for back-in-time activities has low impact on system performance even when snapshots are frequent.

BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{Snap-icde,
   author = {Liuba Shrira and Hao Xu},
   title = {SNAP: a Non-disruptive Snapshot System},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Data Engineering},
   address = {Tokyo, Japan},
   month = april,
   year = {2005}
}