A case for redundant arrays of inexpensive disks (RAID)
SIGMOD '88 Proceedings of the 1988 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
Measurements of a distributed file system
SOSP '91 Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
Network attached storage architecture
Communications of the ACM
Designing computer systems with MEMS-based storage
ASPLOS IX Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Structure and Performance of the Direct Access File System
ATEC '02 Proceedings of the General Track of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
NAS Switch: A Novel CIFS Server Virtualization
MSS '03 Proceedings of the 20 th IEEE/11 th NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSS'03)
A Scalable Architecture for Clustered Network Attached Storage
MSS '03 Proceedings of the 20 th IEEE/11 th NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSS'03)
Concept and Evaluation of X-NAS: A Highly Scalable NAS System
MSS '03 Proceedings of the 20 th IEEE/11 th NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSS'03)
CoStore: A Storage Cluster Architecture Using Network Attached Storage Devices
ICPADS '02 Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems
Storage Systems: Not Just a Bunch of Disks Anymore
Queue - Storage
Issues and Challenges in the Performance Analysis of Real Disk Arrays
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
ASPLOS XI Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
A Performance Evaluation Tool for RAID Disk Arrays
QEST '04 Proceedings of the The Quantitative Evaluation of Systems, First International Conference
Dynamic Metadata Management for Petabyte-Scale File Systems
Proceedings of the 2004 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Storage Over IP: When Does Hardware Support Help?
FAST '03 Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies
A Performance Comparison of NFS and iSCSI for IP-Networked Storage
FAST '04 Proceedings of the 3rd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies
A User-Level Approach To Network Attached Storage
LCN '05 Proceedings of the The IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks 30th Anniversary
File size distribution on UNIX systems: then and now
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
A heterogeneous storage grid enabled by grid service
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
TCP offload is a dumb idea whose time has come
HOTOS'03 Proceedings of the 9th conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems - Volume 9
A comparison of file system workloads
ATEC '00 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
GridJet: An underlying data-transporting protocol for accelerating Web communications
Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
RISC: A resilient interconnection network for scalable cluster storage systems
Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal
EED: Energy Efficient Disk drive architecture
Information Sciences: an International Journal
Informed data distribution selection in a self-predicting storage system
ICAC '06 Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing
End system optimizations for high-speed TCP
IEEE Communications Magazine
Architectures and optimization methods of flash memory based storage systems
Journal of Systems Architecture: the EUROMICRO Journal
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Network Attached Storage (NAS) has been gaining general acceptance, because it can be managed easily and files shared among many clients, which run different operating systems. The advent of Gigabit Ethernet and high speed transport protocols further facilitates the wide adoption of NAS. A distinct feature of NAS is that NAS involves both network I/O and file I/O. This paper analyzes the layered architecture of a typical NAS and the data flow, which travels through the layers. Several benchmarks are employed to explore the overhead involved in the layered NAS architecture and to identify system bottlenecks. The test results indicate that a Gigabit network is the system bottleneck due to the performance disparity between the storage stack and the network stack. The tests also demonstrate that the performance of NAS has lagged far behind that of the local storage subsystem, and the CPU utilization is not as high as imagined. The analysis in this paper gives three implications for the NAS, which adopts a Gigabit network: (1) The most effective method to alleviate the network bottleneck is increasing the physical network bandwidth or improving the utilization of network. For example, a more efficient network file system could boost the NAS performance. (2) It is unnecessary to employ specific hardware to increase the performance of the storage subsystem or the efficiency of the network stack because the hardware cannot contribute to the overall performance improvement. On the contrary, the hardware methods could have side effect on the throughput due to the small file accesses in NAS. (3) Adding more disk drives to an NAS when the aggregate performance reaches the saturation point can only contribute to storage capacity, but not performance. This paper aims to guide NAS designers or administrators to better understand and achieve a cost-effective NAS.