FAB: enterprise storage systems on a shoestring
Svend Frolund, Arif Merchant, Yasushi Saito, Susan Spence and Alistair Veitch
Abstract:
A Federated Array of Bricks (FAB) is a logical disk system that
provides the reliability and performance of enterprise-class disk
arrays, at a fraction of the cost and with better scalability. The
unit of deployment in FAB is a brick, a small rack-mounted
storage appliance built from commodity components including disks, a
CPU, NVRAM, and network cards. Bricks federate themselves in a
completely decentralized manner to provide users with a set of logical
volumes. This paper motivates FAB and introduces our data replication
algorithm based on majority-voting. We argue that majority voting is
practical for ultra-reliable, high-throughput storage systems like
FAB, and present several techniques that improve both the performance
and space overhead of our protocol.
How to view this document:
Last modified: Tue Jul 10 21:36:53 PDT 2001 by Alistair Veitch (aveitch@hpl.hp.com)