ErasureBench is an open-source framework to test and benchmark erasure coding implementations for distributed storage systems under realistic conditions. ErasureBench automatically instantiates and scales a cluster of storage nodes, and can seamlessly leverage existing failure traces.

It consists of a Java application that provides an interface between FUSE and different erasure code implementations. The backend used to store individual blocks can be replaced.

ErasureBench is presented in details in the paper titled Have a Seat on the ErasureBench: Easy Evaluation of Erasure Coding Libraries for Distributed Storage Systems, presented at the Workshop on Planetary-Scale Distributed Systems 2016 (W-PSDS), held in conjunction with the 35th Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS).

The Gradle building system is used to compile and run the project. The easiest way to mount an instance of the tester is to fire up some Docker containers.

Under a Debian GNU/Linux (Jessie) system, all needed dependencies can be installed and configured through the following commands:

$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://p80.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-keys 58118E89F3A912897C070ADBF76221572C52609D
$ echo 'deb https://apt.dockerproject.org/repo debian-jessie main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install docker-engine nfs-common
$ sudo pip install docker-compose
$ sudo usermod -a -G docker <YOUR-USERNAME>
$ sudo systemctl start docker

You then have to log-off and then back on to apply the group modification.

In order to orchestrate multiple containers at once, we use the Docker compose tool that needs to be installed separately from the main Docker engine.

Then, the entire application, including a cluster of 3 Redis servers, can be started using:

$ cd projects/erasure-tester
$ ./run_in_docker.sh

When the containers are started, the exposed FUSE filesystem can be mounted in the host computer via NFS:

$ sudo mount `docker inspect erasuretester_erasure_1 | grep IPAddress | grep -Eo '[0-9.]{7,}' | head -n 1`:/mnt/erasure /mnt/<host-mountpoint>

Do not forget to unmount the NFS filesystem from the host before stopping the containers!

$ sudo umount /mnt/my-mountpoint

As an alternative to mounting the exposed filesystem in the host, a separate "benchmark" container containing benchmarks against the filesystem can be used. It can be launched similarly to the run_in_docker.sh script. The following will run the benchmarks along with all their dependencies:

$ cd projects/erasure-tester
$ ./benchmark_in_docker.sh

The methodology mentioned above make the containers run on the local machine. When a large number of containers are needed, there is the possibility to use Docker Swarm. It aggregates multiple Docker hosts into a single Docker endpoint.

Instructions on how to use that technology are available in a separate file.