From hadoop 2.3.0 onwards, hdfs supports heterogeneous storage. What is this heterogeneous storage? What are the advantages of using this?.

Hadoop came as a processing system for processing and storing huge data, a scalable batch processing system. But now it became the platform for DataLake for Enterprises. In large enterprises, various types of data needs to be stored and processed for advanced analytics. Some of these data are required frequently, some are not required frequently, some are required very rarely. If we store all these in the same platform or hardware, the cost will be more. For example, if we are using a cluster in AWS. We have EC2 nodes for our cluster nodes. EC2 uses EBS and ephemeral storage. Depending upon the type of storage, the cost varies. S3 storage is cheaper than EBS storage, but access speed will be less. Similarly glacier will be cheaper compared to S3, but again the data retrieval will take time. Similarly, if we want to keep data in different storage types depending upon the priority and requirement, we can use this feature in hadoop. This feature was not available in earlier versions of hadoop. This is available in hadoop version 2.3.0 onwards. Now datanode can be defined as a collection of storages. Various storage policies available in hadoop are Hot, Warm, Cold, All_SSD, One_SSD and Lazy_Persist.

  • Hot – for both storage and compute. The data that is popular and still being used for processing will stay in this policy. When a block is hot, all replicas are stored in DISK.
  • Cold – only for storage with limited compute. The data that is no longer being used, or data that needs to be archived is moved from hot storage to cold storage. When a block is cold, all replicas are stored in ARCHIVE.
  • Warm – partially hot and partially cold. When a block is warm, some of its replicas are stored in DISK and the remaining replicas are stored in ARCHIVE.
  • All_SSD – for storing all replicas in SSD.
  • One_SSD – for storing one of the replicas in SSD. The remaining replicas are stored in DISK.
  • Lazy_Persist – for writing blocks with single replica in memory. The replica is first written in RAM_DISK and then it is lazily persisted in DISK.
Advertisement