A design study for network based storage systems and performance evaluation

It is well know that network-attached storage (NAS) systems have several advantages compared with traditional storage systems. NAS offers new possibilities in building a distributed storage system, providing direct data transfer between the clients and storage disks. We discuss the underlying technology trends that are leading to high performance network-based storage, and provide a description of the design of our NAS system, HUSTserver (Huazhong University of Science and Technology server), from the software and hardware architecture point of view. RAID (redundant arrays of inexpensive disks) is a key technology leading to high performance and reliability in the I/O subsystem. We introduce a software RAID prototype, RAIDframe, as our system disk volume manager. In addition, we report on the performance obtained at each layer of the system, including the RAID I/O subsystem and the overall system capacity.