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A Study on Evolution of Storage Infrastructure

— The amount of data today that needs in every aspect is growing at an explosive rate. The necessity to store this amount of data and access it from different places the systems has caused dramatic changes in the storage infrastructure. Storage infrastructure is the complete set of hardware and software components required to facilitate storage for a system. This study paper revolves around the evolutions associated with the storage infrastructure are explained to overcome the challenges of increasing demands to store more and more information. Also, the different levels of storage infrastructure over last few decades to meet changing customers need are explained in this paper. I. INTRODUCTION Infrastructure refers to the collection of physical and virtual resources that provides compatibility with all the IT environment such as the server, storage, and network components. Storage infrastructure is also called as a Storage system that is mainly designed by taking potentiality of various storage devices and including the layers of hardware and software to acquire highly reliable, high-performance and easily managed system. To provide the flexibility and stability for the rapidly increasing storage demands the evolutions of storage infrastructure has taken into consideration. There are different levels of Evolution in storage infrastructure-the lowest level of storage infrastructure is hard disks. The hard drive is the non-removable rigid magnetic disk with a large data storage capacity. This paper also focuses different trends of the hard disk. Fibre Channel (FC) is the serial hard disc interface frequently found to endeavour storage environments. FC is famous due to its tremendous speed. Then the hard disks are grouped together into arrays to evolve the RAID technology to provide the data redundancy and performance to the system. As the infrastructure develops further, the new concept clustering emerges. Storage cluster is defined as the groups of storage arrays sharing redundant connections to work collaboratively as a single storage system. The storage systems are attached to evolve DAS, SAN, NAS. DAS storage connects directly to a server (host) or a group of servers in a cluster. The SAN operate behind the servers to provide a common path among storage devices and servers.The primary goal of NAS serving files either by its hardware, software, or configuration. In spite of this, the new configurations are becoming popular including iSCSI.

Evaluation of the NetApp E5560 Storage System

2013

In the frame of the collaboration activities between the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) and the Technical University of Dresden (TUD), we evaluated the NetApp E5560 system installed pre GA at the University of Dresden. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the mentioned product, including a comparison between the two storage technologies DDP (Dynamic Disk Pool) and RAID6. We investigated different benchmark scenarios that cover reliability and scalability issues. The benchmarks were run against idle controllers and controllers that had to rebuild one or two failed drives at the same time. We describe the hardware, infrastructure, the system software stack, and the benchmark tools used. The tools obdfilter-survey, IOR and dd have been used for benchmarking. Most of the test where run multiple times and the best value found is used for this paper. The tests utilized four servers connected to four controller pairs with a total of 120 drives for every controller pair. SAS 2.0 links are used to connect to the DE6600 enclosures and to the I/O servers, while IB FDR is used to connect the file servers with the clients.

The software architecture of a SAN storage control system

IBM Systems Journal, 2000

We describe an architecture of an enterpriselevel storage control system that addresses the issues of storage management for storage area network (SAN) -attached block devices in a heterogeneous open systems environment. The storage control system, also referred to as the "storage virtualization engine," is built on a cluster of Linux ® -based servers, which provides redundancy, modularity, and scalability. We discuss the software architecture of the storage control system and describe its major components: the cluster operating environment, the distributed I/O facilities, the buffer management component, and the hierarchical object pools for managing memory resources. We also describe some preliminary results that indicate the system will achieve its goals of improving the utilization of storage resources, providing a platform for advanced storage functions, using off-the-shelf hardware components and a standard operating system, and facilitating upgrades to new generations of hardware, different hardware platforms, and new storage functions.

Highly Available and Heterogeneous Continuous Media Storage Systems

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2004

A number of recent technological trends have made data intensive applications such as continuous media (audio and video) servers a reality. These servers store and retrieve large volumes of data using magnetic disks. Servers consisting of multiple nodes and large arrays of heterogeneous disk drives have become a fact of life for several reasons. First, magnetic disks might fail. Failed disks are almost always replaced with newer disk models because the current technological trend for these devices is one of annual increase in both performance and storage capacity. Second, storage requirements are ever increasing, forcing servers to be scaled up progressively. In this study, we present a framework to enable parity-based data protection for heterogeneous storage systems and to compute their mean lifetime. We describe the tradeoffs associated with three alternative techniques: independent subservers, dependent subservers, and disk merging. The disk merging approach provides a solution for systems that require highly available secondary storage in environments that also necessitate maximum flexibility.

Scalable and manageable storage systems

Emerging applications such as data warehousing, multimedia content distribution, electronic commerce and medical and satellite databases have substantial storage requirements that are growing at 3X to 5X per year. Such applications require scalable, highly-available and cost-effective storage systems. Traditional storage systems rely on a central controller (file server, disk array controller) to access storage and copy data between storage devices and clients which limits their scalability.

Distributed and Hierarchical Storage Systems

1999

We discuss issues and technologies for implementing and applying distributed, high-performance storage systems. We review a range of software systems for distributed storage management, and summarise what we believe to be the most important issues and the outstanding problems in distributed storage research. We outline our vision for integrated storage management that is compatible with our DISCWorld wide-area service-based metacomputing environment. Very large on-line archives present a challenge and our driving force for developing a distributed storage system. In addition, robotic tape silos form the lowest level of many of these archives. Their integration into the storage hierarchy is often non-trivial, proprietary and expensive. We describe how our system can provide the necessary infrastructure for such applications.

A Survey on Tiering and Caching in High-Performance Storage Systems

ArXiv, 2019

Although every individual invented storage technology made a big step towards perfection, none of them is spotless. Different data store essentials such as performance, availability, and recovery requirements have not met together in a single economically affordable medium, yet. One of the most influential factors is price. So, there has always been a trade-off between having a desired set of storage choices and the costs. To address this issue, a network of various types of storing media is used to deliver the high performance of expensive devices such as solid state drives and non-volatile memories, along with the high capacity of inexpensive ones like hard disk drives. In software, caching and tiering are long-established concepts for handling file operations and moving data automatically within such a storage network and manage data backup in low-cost media. Intelligently moving data around different devices based on the needs is the key insight for this matter. In this survey, ...

Storage Systems Support for Multimedia Applications

2000

Lately, on-demand streaming multimedia applications have become very popular. Contemporary personal computers can handle the load imposed by such multimedia applications on the client side, but the potentially high number of concurrent users accessing a server represents a generic problem. The multimedia storage system is responsible for storage and retrieval of multimedia data from storage devices, and plays a vital role for the performance and scalability of multimedia servers. It deals with issues related to data placement, scheduling, file management, continuous data delivery, buffer management, prefetching, etc., and with the particular demands of multimedia applications, such as real-time characteristics, large file sizes, high data rates, and several data sources. Performing these tasks and supporting these requirements appropriately are burdened by an increasing speed mismatch between processors and the most prolific and affordable storage devices, -magnetic disks -, and by the introduction of new requirements in new multimedia scenarios.