A cost-effective, high-bandwidth storage architecture

TLDR

Scalable, cost‑effective storage bandwidth is increasingly needed as dataset sizes grow, new attachment technologies emerge, and on‑drive transistors become more available, motivating the NASD architecture. The paper presents the Network‑Attached Secure Disk (NASD) architecture, its prototype drives, array management, and three built‑in filesystems. NASD achieves this by directly transferring data to clients, providing cryptographic security, employing asynchronous non‑critical‑path oversight, and supporting variably sized data objects. Prototype measurements demonstrate cost‑effective integration, no performance loss with conventional filesystems, scalable bandwidth, and linear scaling of 6.2 MB/s per client‑drive pair up to eight pairs.

Abstract

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, for transferring 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 switched 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-effectively 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 performance 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.