Technical Reports
HPL-2011-70
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High-speed storage nodes for the cloud
Edwards, Nigel; Watkins, Mark; Gates, Matt; Coles, Alistair; Deliot, Eric; Edwards, Aled; Fischer, Anna; Goldsack, Patrick; Hancock, Tom; McCabe, Donagh; Reddin, Tim; Sullivan, JP; Toft, Peter; Wilcock, Lawrence
HP Laboratories
HPL-2011-70
Keyword(s): Virtualization, storage, virtual machines, cloud computing, infrastructure as a service
Abstract: In this paper, we describe an architecture for high- speed storage nodes intended for supporting cloud- based storage I/O intensive applications such as file servers, backup servers and databases. The nodes can host multiple virtual machines each having direct access to a storage array via Single Route I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV). This is done in a way which does not compromise security. We demonstrate that SR- IOV imposes negligible overhead for storage I/O and provides the hosted virtual machines with four times the storage I/O bandwidth than is available from the same hardware when I/O is redirected through the hypervisor. We describe how the storage nodes are incorporated into a heterogeneous Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consisting of mixed storage and compute nodes.
9 Pages Additional Publication Information: To be published as "High-speed storage nodes for the cloud", Nigel Edwards, Mark Watkins, Matt Gates, Alistair Coles, Eric Deliot, Aled Edwards, Anna Fischer, Patrick Goldsack, Tom Hancock, Donagh McCabe, Tim Reddin, JP Sullivan, Peter Toft, Lawrence Wilcock, in 4th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2011), December 5-7 2011, Melbourne, Australia.
External Posting Date: September 19, 2011 [Fulltext]. Approved for External Publication
Internal Posting Date: May 21, 2011 [Fulltext]