IP storage : a performance and security study, LDRD 04-1021.

Effective, high-performance, networked file systems and storage is needed to solve I/O bottlenecks between large compute platforms. Frequently, parallel techniques such as PFTP, are employed to overcome the adverse effect of TCP's congestion avoidance algorithm in order to achieve reasonable aggregate throughput. These techniques can suffer from end-system bottlenecks due to the protocol processing overhead and memory copies involved in moving large amounts of data during I/O. Moreover, transferring data using PFTP requires manual operation, lacking the transparency to allow for interactive visualization and computational steering of large-scale simulations from distributed locations. This paper evaluates the emerging Internet SCSI (iSCSI) protocol [2] as the file/data transport in order that remote clients can transparently access data through a distributed global file system available to local clients. We started our work characterizing the performance behavior of iSCSI in Local Area Networks (LANs). We then proceeded to study the effect of propagation delay on throughput using remote iSCSI storage and explored optimization techniques to mitigate the adverse effects of long delay in high-bandwidth Wide Area Networks (WANs). Lastly, we evaluated iSCSI in a Storage Area Network (SAN) for a Global Parallel Filesystem. We conducted our benchmark based on typical usage model of large-scale scientific applications at Sandia. We demonstrated the benefit of high-performance parallel VO to scientific applications at the IEEE 2004 Supercomputing Conference, using experiences and knowledge gained from this study

Securing Internet Protocol (IP) Storage: A Case Study

Storage networking technology has enjoyed strong growth in recent years, but security concerns and threats facing networked data have grown equally fast. Today, there are many potential threats that are targeted at storage networks, including data modification, destruction and theft, DoS attacks, malware, hardware theft and unauthorized access, among others. In order for a Storage Area Network (SAN) to be secure, each of these threats must be individually addressed. In this paper, we present a comparative study by implementing different security methods in IP Storage network.Comment: 10 Pages, IJNGN Journa

Storage Area Networks

This tutorial compares Storage area Network (SAN) technology with previous storage management solutions with particular attention to promised benefits of scalability, interoperability, and high-speed LAN-free backups. The paper provides an overview of what SANs are, why invest in them, and how SANs can be managed. The paper also discusses a primary management concern, the interoperability of vendor-specific SAN solutions. Bluefin, a storage management interface and interoperability solution is also explained. The paper concludes with discussion of SAN-related trends and implications for practice and research

CloudJet4BigData: Streamlining Big Data via an Accelerated Socket Interface

Big data needs to feed users with fresh processing results and cloud platforms can be used to speed up big data applications. This paper describes a new data communication protocol (CloudJet) for long distance and large volume big data accessing operations to alleviate the large latencies encountered in sharing big data resources in the clouds. It encapsulates a dynamic multi-stream/multi-path engine at the socket level, which conforms to Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) and thereby can accelerate any POSIX-compatible applications across IP based networks. It was demonstrated that CloudJet accelerates typical big data applications such as very large database (VLDB), data mining, media streaming and office applications by up to tenfold in real-world tests

Learning network storage curriculum with experimental case based on embedded systems

In this paper, we present an experimental case for the course of Network Storage and Security, which benefited from an improved learning outcome for our students. The newly designed experiments-based contents are merged into the current course to help students obtain practical experiences about network storage. The experiments aim to build a network storage system based on available resources instead of any specialized network storage equipment. Technically, students can learn general practical knowledge of network storage on iSCSI (a network storage protocol based on IP technology) and also the technologies of embedded system. Through the experimental case, we found that it could fully enhance students\u27 comprehensive and practical abilities, develop students\u27 teamwork spirit and creativity, and especially improve the learning outcome of network storage curriculum. These learning and thinking methods can also be generalized and applied to other computer science related courses

M2: Malleable Metal as a Service

Existing bare-metal cloud services that provide users with physical nodes have a number of serious disadvantage over their virtual alternatives, including slow provisioning times, difficulty for users to release nodes and then reuse them to handle changes in demand, and poor tolerance to failures. We introduce M2, a bare-metal cloud service that uses network-mounted boot drives to overcome these disadvantages. We describe the architecture and implementation of M2 and compare its agility, scalability, and performance to existing systems. We show that M2 can reduce provisioning time by over 50% while offering richer functionality, and comparable run-time performance with respect to tools that provision images into local disks. M2 is open source and available at https://github.com/CCI-MOC/ims.Comment: IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering 201

The Architecture and Performance Evaluation of iSCSI-Based United Storage Network Merging NAS and SAN

With the ever increasing volume of data in networks, the traditional storage architecture is greatly challenged; more and more people pay attention to network storage. Currently, the main technology of network storage is represented by NAS (Network Attached Storage) and SAN (Storage Area Network). They are different, but mutually complementary and used under different circumstances; however, both NAS and SAN may be needed in the same company. To reduce the TOC (total of cost), for easier implementation, etc., people hope to merge the two technologies. Additionally, the main internetworking technology of SAN is the Fibre Channel; however, the major obstacles are in its poor interoperability, lack of trained staff, high implementation costs, etc. To solve the above-mentioned issues, this paper creatively introduces a novel storage architecture called USN (United Storage Networks), which uses the iSCSI to build the storage network, and merges the NAS and SAN techniques supplying the virtues and overcoming the drawbacks of both, and provides both file I/O and block I/O service simultaneously

Implementation and comparison of iSCSI over RDMA

iSCSI is an emerging storage network technology that allows for block-level access to disk drives over a computer network. Since iSCSI runs over the very ubiquitous TCP/IP protocol it has many advantages over its more proprietary alternatives. Due to the recent movement toward 10 gigabit Ethernet, storage vendors are interested to see how this large increase in network bandwidth could benefit the iSCSI protocol. In order to make full use of the bandwidth provided by a 10 gigabit Ethernet link, specialized Remote Direct Memory Access hardware is being developed to offload processing and reduce the data-copy-overhead found in a standard TCP/IP network stack. This thesis focuses on the development of an iSCSI implementation that is capable of supporting this new hardware and the evaluation of its performance. This thesis depicts the approach used to implement the iSCSI Extensions for Remote Direct Memory Access (iSER) with the UNH iSCSI reference implementation. This approach involves a three step process: moving UNH-iSCSI from the Linux kernel to the Linux user-space, adding support for the iSER extensions to our user-space iSCSI and finally moving everything back into the Linux kernel. In addition to a description of the implementation, results are given that demonstrate the performance of the completed iSER-assisted iSCSI implementation

Distributed exact deduplication for primary storage infrastructures

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 8460, 2014Deduplication of primary storage volumes in a cloud computing environment is increasingly desirable, as the resulting space savings contribute to the cost effectiveness of a large scale multi-tenant infrastructure. However, traditional archival and backup deduplication systems impose prohibitive overhead for latency-sensitive applications deployed at these infrastructures while, current primary deduplication systems rely on special cluster filesystems, centralized components, or restrictive workload assumptions. We present DEDIS, a fully-distributed and dependable system that performs exact and cluster-wide background deduplication of primary storage. DEDIS does not depend on data locality and works on top of any unsophisticated storage backend, centralized or distributed, that exports a basic shared block device interface. The evaluation of an open-source prototype shows that DEDIS scales out and adds negligible overhead even when deduplication and intensive storage I/O run simultaneously.(undefined