Efficient Many-to-One Communication for a Distributed RAID

Any set of autonomous workstations, however networked (by a LAN, a MAN, or wireless), can be seen as a collection of networked low cost disks. Such a collection can be operated by proper software so as to provide the abstraction of a single, larger block device, made available to all the participants on a peer-to-peer basis. By adding enough data redundancy, the disk collection as a whole could act as single distributed RAID, providing capacity and reliability along with the convenient price/performance typical of commodity hard disks. This paper reports about issues of communication performance in a prototype of distributed RAID device called DRAID. DRAID offers storage services Single I/O Space (SIOS) block device abstraction. The SIOS feature implies that the storage space is accessible through each of the participant stations, rather than through one or few fixed end-points. The paper focuses on the inefficiency of communication when a client reads data stripes from a number of re...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: CCGRID
• Authors: Alessandro Di Marco, Giuseppe Ciaccio
• Keywords: Block Device, CCGRID 2006, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Larger Block Device, Single Distributed Raid