FAB: building distributed enterprise disk arrays from commodity components

This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a Federated Array of Bricks (FAB), a distributed disk array that provides the reliability of traditional enterprise arrays with lower cost and better scalability. FAB is built from a collection of bricks, small storage appliances containing commodity disks, CPU, NVRAM, and network interface cards. FAB deploys a new majority-votingbased algorithm to replicate or erasure-code logical blocks across bricks and a reconfiguration algorithm to move data in the background when bricks are added or decommissioned. We argue that voting is practical and necessary for reliable, high-throughput storage systems such as FAB. We have implemented a FAB prototype on a 22-node Linux cluster. This prototype sustains 85MB/second of throughput for a database workload, and 270MB/second for a bulk-read workload. In addition, it can outperform traditional masterslave replication through performance decoupling and can handle brick failures and ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ASPLOS
• Authors: Yasushi Saito, Svend Frølund, Alistair C. Veitch, Arif Merchant, Susan Spence
• Keywords: ASPLOS 2004, Disk Array, FAB Prototype, Programming Languages, Small Storage Appliances