Data storage in Big Data Context: A Survey

As data volumes to be processed in all domains; scientific, professional, social ...etc., are increasing at a high speed, their management and storage raises more and more challenges. The emergence of highly scalable infrastructures has contributed to the evolution of storage management technologies. However, numerous problems have emerged such as consistency and availability of data, scalability of environments or yet the competitive access to data. The objective of this paper is to review, discuss and compare the main characteristics of some major technological orientations existing on the market, such as Google File System (GFS) and IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) or yet on the open source systems such as Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), Blobseer and Andrew File System (AFS), in order to understand the needs and constraints that led to these orientations. For each case, we will discuss a set of major problems of big data storage management, and how they were addressed in order to provide the best storage services.