File Server Scaling with Network-Attached Secure Disks

By providing direct data transfer between storage and client, network-attached storage devices have the potential to improve scalability for existing distributed file systems (by removing the server as a bottleneck) and bandwidth for new parallel and distributed file systems (through network striping and more efficient data paths). Together, these advantages influence a large enough fraction of the storage market to make commodity network-attached storage feasible. Realizing the technology’s full potential requires careful consideration across a wide range of file system, networking and security issues. This paper contrasts two network-attached storage architectures—(1) Networked SCSI disks (NetSCSI) are networkattached storage devices with minimal changes from the familiar SCSI interface, while (2) Network-Attached Secure Disks (NASD) are drives that support independent client access to drive object services. To estimate the potential performance benefits of these architect...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Garth A. Gibson, David Nagle, Khalil Amiri, Fay W. Chang, Eugene M. Feinberg, Howard Gobioff, Chen Lee, Berend Ozceri, Erik Riedel, David Rochberg, Jim Zelenka
• Keywords: Hardware, Network-attached Storage, Network-attached Storage Devices, SIGMETRICS 1997, file System