Scalable Storage Architecture for Multiple Streaming I/O Applications

Abstract

A scalable system can be built when the storage devices such as HDD’s are provided to the system via network and the parallel data paths between the hosts and the storage devices are provided independent of others. We built a parallel network direct attached storage architecture that offers two requirements for scalable storage system; (1) unlimited storage expansion via network, and (2) parallel direct data paths between the hosts and the HDD’s. Our prototype was verified to have practically unlimited storage capacity up to hundreds of HDD’s with its total aggregated I/O bandwidth proportional to the number of HDD’s attached to the network. From the experiments, actual performance of individual HDD’s in our prototype was verified to be about 70MB/s per HDD with the maximum total aggregated I/O speed of n x 70MB/s where n is the total number of HDD’s attached to the network.