FAB: Building distributed enterprise disk arrays from commodity components
Yasushi Saito, Svend Frolund, Alistair Veitch, Arif Merchant, Susan Spence
Abstract:
This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a
Federated Array of Bricks (FAB), a distributed disk array that
provides the reliability of traditional enterprise arrays with lower
cost and better scalability. FAB is built from a collection of
bricks, small storage appliances containing commodity disks,
CPU, NVRAM, and network interface cards. FAB deploys a new
majority-voting-based algorithm to replicate or erasure-code logical
blocks across bricks and a reconfiguration algorithm to move data in
the background when bricks are added or decommissioned. We argue that
voting is practical and necessary for reliable, high-throughput
storage systems such as FAB. We have implemented a FAB prototype on a
22-node Linux cluster. This prototype sustains 85MB/second of
throughput for a database workload, and 270MB/second for a bulk-read
workload. In addition, it can outperform traditional master-slave
replication through performance decoupling and can handle brick
failures and recoveries smoothly without disturbing client requests.
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Last modified: Tue Jul 10 21:36:53 PDT 2001 by Alistair Veitch (aveitch@hpl.hp.com)