The Swarm Scalable Storage System

Swarm is a storage system that provides scalable, reliable, and cost-effective data storage. Swarm is based on storage servers, rather than file servers; the storage servers are optimized for cost-performance and aggregated to provide high-performance data access. Swarm uses a striped raction to store data on the storage servers. This abstraction simplifies storage allocation, improves file access performance, balances server loads, provides faulttolerance through computed redundancy, and simplifies crash recovery. We have developed a Swarm prototype using a cluster of Linux-based personal computers as the storage servers and clients; the clients access the servers via the Swarm-based Sting file system. Our performance measurements show that a single Swarm client can write to two storage servers at 3.0 MB/s., while four clients can write to eight servers at 16.0 MB/s.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: John H. Hartman, Ian Murdock, Tammo Spalink
• Keywords: Cost-effective Data Storage, Distributed And Parallel Computing, ICDCS 1999, Storage Servers, Swarm