"Appears in the Proceedings of the ACM International Conference
on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (Sigmetrics '97),
Seattle, Washington, June 15-18, 1997."
File Server Scaling with Network-Attached Secure Disks
Garth A. Gibson, David F. Nagle*, Khalil Amiri*, Fay W. Chang,
Eugene M. Feinberg*, Howard Gobioff, Chen Lee, Berend Ozceri*,
Erik Riedel*, David Rochberg, Jim Zelenka
*Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
garth+nasd@cs.cmu.edu
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-(1) Networked SCSI disks (NetSCSI) are network-attached
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 trace-driven replay experiments based on
AFS and NFS traces. Our results suggest that NetSCSI can reduce file
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.
Chen Lee
Last modified: Thu Dec 18 23:16:14 EST 1997