Howard Gobioff

A cost-effective, high-bandwidth storage architecture

This paper describes the Network-Attached Secure Disk (NASD) storage architecture, prototype implementations oj NASD drives, array management for our architecture, and three, filesystems built on our prototype. NASD provides scalable storage bandwidth without the cost of servers used primarily, for transferring data from peripheral networks (e.g. SCSI) to client networks (e.g. ethernet). Increasing datuset sizes, new attachment technologies, the convergence of peripheral and interprocessor switched networks, and the increased availability of on-drive transistors motivate and enable this new architecture. NASD is based on four main principles: direct transfer to clients, secure interfaces via cryptographic support, asynchronous non-critical-path oversight, and variably-sized data objects. Measurements of our prototype system show that these services can be cost-effectively integrated into a next generation disk drive ASK. End-to-end measurements of our prototype drive andfilesysterns suggest that NASD cun support conventional distributed filesystems without performance degradation. More importantly, we show scaluble bandwidth for NASD-specialized filesystems. Using a parallel data mining application, NASD drives deliver u linear scaling of 6.2 MB/s per clientdrive pair, tested with up to eight pairs in our lab.

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 technologys 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 network-attached 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 architectures, we develop an analytic model and perform trace-driven replay experiments based on AFS and NFS traces. Our results suggest that NetSCSI can reduce file server load during a burst of NFS or AFS activity by about 30%. With the NASD architecture, server load (during burst activity) can be reduced by a factor of up to five for AFS and up to ten for NFS.

Integrity and Performance in Network Attached Storage

Computer security is of growing importance in the increasingly networked computing environment. This work examines the issue of high-performance network security, specifically integrity, by focusing on integrating security into network storage system. Emphasizing the cost-constrained environment of storage, we examine how current software-based cryptography cannot support storages Gigabit/sec transfer rates. To solve this problem, we introduce a novel message authentication code, based on stored message digests. This allows storage to deliver high-performance, a factor of five improvement in our prototypes integrity protected bandwidth, without hardware acceleration for common read operations. For receivers, where precomputation cannot be done, we outline an inline message authentication code that minimizes buffering requirements.