A cost-effective, high-bandwidth storage architecture

Garth A. Gibson, Jim Zelenka, David F. Nagle, Khalil Amiri, Jeff Butler, Fay W. Chang, Howard Gobioff, Charles Hardin, Erik Riedel, David Rochberg
1998 SIGPLAN notices  
This paper describes the Network-Attached Secure Disk (NASD) storage architecture, prototype implementations oj NASD drives, array management for our architecture, and three,filesystems built on our prototype. NASD provides scalable storage bandwidth without the cost of servers used primarily ,fijr trut&rring data from peripheral networks (e.g. SCSI) to client networks (e.g. ethernet). Increasing datuset sizes, new attachment technologies, the convergence of peripheral and interprocessor
more » ... d networks, and the increased availability of on-drive transistors motivate and enable this new architecture. NASD is based on four main principles: direct transfer to clients, secure interfaces via cryptographic support, asynchronous non-critical-path oversight, and variably-sized data objects. Measurements of our prototype system show that these services can be cost-#ectively integrated into a next generation disk drive ASK. End-to-end measurements of our prototype drive andfilesysterns suggest that NASD cun support conventional distributed filesystems without per$ormance degradation. More importantly, we show scaluble bandwidth for NASD-specialized filesystems. Using a parallel data mining application, NASD drives deliver u linear scaling of 6.2 MB/s per clientdrive pair, tested with up to eight pairs in our lab. Keywords D.4.3 File systems management, D.4.7 Distributed systems, B.4 Input/Output and Data Communications.
doi:10.1145/291006.291029 fatcat:uf7psr7vbfcnlcwlixka7xlaga