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

An Experiment on Bare-Metal BigData Provisioning

Many BigData customers use on-demand platforms in the cloud, where they can get a dedicated virtual cluster in a couple of minutes and pay only for the time they use. Increasingly, there is a demand for bare-metal bigdata solutions for applications that cannot tolerate the unpredictability and performance degradation of virtualized systems. Existing bare-metal solutions can introduce delays of 10s of minutes to provision a cluster by installing operating systems and applications on the local disks of servers. This has motivated recent research developing sophisticated mechanisms to optimize this installation. These approaches assume that using network mounted boot disks incur unacceptable run-time overhead. Our analysis suggest that while this assumption is true for application data, it is incorrect for operating systems and applications, and network mounting the boot disk and applications result in negligible run-time impact while leading to faster provisioning time.This research was supported in part by the MassTech Collaborative Research Matching Grant Program, NSF awards 1347525 and 1414119 and several commercial partners of the Massachusetts Open Cloud who may be found at http://www.massopencloud.or

Performance comparison between iSCSI and other hardware and software solutions

We report on our investigations on some technologies that can be used to build disk servers and networks of disk servers using commodity hardware and software solutions. It focuses on the performance that can be achieved by these systems and gives measured figures for different configurations. It is divided into two parts : iSCSI and other technologies and hardware and software RAID solutions. The first part studies different technologies that can be used by clients to access disk servers using a gigabit ethernet network. It covers block access technologies (iSCSI, hyperSCSI, ENBD). Experimental figures are given for different numbers of clients and servers. The second part compares a system based on 3ware hardware RAID controllers, a system using linux software RAID and IDE cards and a system mixing both hardware RAID and software RAID. Performance measurements for reading and writing are given for different RAID levels.Comment: Paper associated to a poster from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 4 pages, LaTeX. PSN TUDP00

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