Design, implementation and evaluation of a virtual storage system

Large organizations always have a strong demand for storage from data-intensive applications and instruments. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a new virtual storage system, Storage@desk, which can aggregate a large number of distributed machines within an organization to provide storage services with quality of service guarantees. Because storage virtualization is the prominent goal, Storage@desk provides clients with the abstraction of a hard drive by utilizing the Internet SCSI protocol. As such, data access to new storage services is transparent so that clients do not need to modify any existing applications nor change their current practices. Storage@desk replicates data and employs version-based journaling for high availability. It utilizes a market-based model for resource management and a feedback controller for automated performance control. We have developed a prototype of Storage@desk that implements the core components. Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.