SIFA: a scalable file system with intelligent file allocation

In this paper we propose and evaluate a new NAS based system which is a consolidated file system in a network environment. The consolidated file system utilizes storage boxes cooperating as peers to provide all file system services, and presents itself to its NFS clients as a unified storage server. We have prototyped several key operations in this system. To provide more performance insights, we build a comprehensive system simulator and conduct extensive performance studies for the system via the simulator This simulator has been run against a workload of a real Web server and the system behavior of this workload is studied. In light of the experimental results, a consolidated file system is being implemented in full scale.