—Large, reliable and efficient storage systems are becoming increasingly important in enterprise environments. Our research in storage system design is oriented towards the exploitation of commodity hardware for building a high performance, resilient and scalable storage system. We present the design and implementation of DHTbd, a general purpose decentralized storage system where storage nodes support a distributed hash table based interface and clients are implemented as in-kernel device drivers. DHTbd, unlike most storage systems proposed to date, is implemented at the block device level of the I/O stack, a simple yet efficient design. The experimental evaluation of the proposed system demonstrates its very good I/O performance, its ability to scale to large clusters, as well as its robustness, even when massive failures occur.
George Parissis, George Xylomenos, Theodore K. Apo