Kakao Unveils Construction of Large-Scale Distributed Storage 'Kage' and Cold Storage 'Cave'

Kakao built the large-scale distributed storage system 'Kage (KAkao storaGE)' to address the scalability limitations of NAS caused by increasing user counts and traffic. Kage adopts a triple-replication structure that physically replicates data across 3 different storage locations to distribute read traffic and handle failures, while ensuring service continuity through an IDC redundancy policy. Additionally, Kakao introduced the cold storage system 'Cave' to efficiently store data whose access frequency has decreased over time. Instead of Kage's existing triple replication, Cave applies Reed-Solomon encoding to divide data into 6 data blocks and 3 parity blocks, storing a total of 9 blocks. This method allows original data recovery with only 6 blocks, providing high storage efficiency and stability by lowering the Replication Factor to 1.5 while tolerating up to 3 disk failures.