FAB: enterprise storage systems on a shoestring

  • Authors:

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

  • Affiliations:

  • Storage Systems Department, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA;Storage Systems Department, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA;Storage Systems Department, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA;Storage Systems Department, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA;Storage Systems Department, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • HOTOS'03 Proceedings of the 9th conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems - Volume 9
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

A Federated Array of Bricks (FAB) is a logical disk system that provides the reliability and performance of enterprise-class disk arrays, at a fraction of the cost and with better scalability. The unit of deployment in FAB is a brick, a small rack-mounted storage appliance built from commodity components including disks, a CPU, NVRAM, and network cards. Bricks federate themselves in a completely decentralized manner to provide users with a set of logical volumes. This paper motivates FAB and introduces our data replication algorithm based on majority-voting. We argue that majority voting is practical for ultra-reliable, high-throughput storage systems like FAB, and present several techniques that improve both the performance and space overhead of our protocol.