File server scaling with network-attached secure disks

Abstract

By providing direct data transfer between storage and client, network-attached storage devices have the potential to improve scalability for existing distributed file systems (by removing the server as a bottleneck) and bandwidth for new parallel and distributed file systems (through network striping and more efficient data paths). Together, these advantages influence a large enough fraction of the storage market to make commodity network-attached storage feasible. Realizing the technology's full potential requires careful consideration across a wide range of file system, networking and security issues. This paper contrasts two network-attached storage architectures-(l)Networked SCSI disks (NetSCSI) are networkattached storage devices with minimal changes from the familiar SCSI interface, while (2) Network-Attached Secure Disks (NASD) are drives that support independent client access to drive object services. To estimate the potential performance benefits of these architectures, we develop an analytic model and perform tracedriven replay experiments based on AFS and NFS traces. Our results suggest that NetSCSI can reduce tile server load during a burst of NFS or AFS activity by about 30%. With the NASD architecture, server load (during burst activity) can be reduced by a factor of up to five for AFS and up to ten for NFS.

Evaluation of active storage strategies for the lustre parallel file system

“…Another concept which profits the processing power of the disk drives, and delegates more responsibilities to them, is the object-based storage device (OSD) [11,18]. The OSD's have become a key element in some recent parallel file systems (such as Lustre [5] and the Panasas File System [21]), other industry products (IBM Storage Tank [12], EMC Centera [8], etc.…”

Network-Embedded Programmable Storage and Its Applications

“…Existing cryptographic techniques for authentication, secure booting, and secure links can be used for this purpose [14,15].…”

A Bandwidth Sensitive Distributed Continuous Media File System Using the Fibre Channel Network

“…While several highly scalable file systems have been built using such direct attached disks (e.g., Global File System (GFS) [8], File systems for NASD [4], xFS [2] among many others), they have all been designed for traditional text-based data (i.e., file systems consisting of many small files), and are not well suited for streaming continuous media files, which are characterized by large volumes of data and stringent bandwidth requirements.…”