FAB: building distributed enterprise disk arrays from commodity components

  • Authors:
  • Yasushi Saito;Svend Frølund;Alistair Veitch;Arif Merchant;Susan Spence

  • Affiliations:
  • Hewlett-Packard Laboratories;Hewlett-Packard Laboratories;Hewlett-Packard Laboratories;Hewlett-Packard Laboratories;Hewlett-Packard Laboratories

  • Venue:
  • ASPLOS XI Proceedings of the 11th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a Federated Array of Bricks (FAB), a distributed disk array that provides the reliability of traditional enterprise arrays with lower cost and better scalability. FAB is built from a collection of bricks, small storage appliances containing commodity disks, CPU, NVRAM, and network interface cards. FAB deploys a new majority-voting-based algorithm to replicate or erasure-code logical blocks across bricks and a reconfiguration algorithm to move data in the background when bricks are added or decommissioned. We argue that voting is practical and necessary for reliable, high-throughput storage systems such as FAB. We have implemented a FAB prototype on a 22-node Linux cluster. This prototype sustains 85MB/second of throughput for a database workload, and 270MB/second for a bulk-read workload. In addition, it can outperform traditional master-slave replication through performance decoupling and can handle brick failures and recoveries smoothly without disturbing client requests.