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Alan Tackett
Abstract
As the use of increasingly larger computational centers and the GRID has exploded, the need for storage has likewise exploded. Users are beginning to make use of these resources in new and unique ways. Most traditional storage paradigms have not scaled to meet the increasing demands, forcing the creation of new paradigms. As a result, innovative storage solutions are emerging to handle the new demands. Vanderbilt has been researching, developing, and implementing several of these novel storage solutions.
Shared file system – Multiple machines (potentially with differing operating systems) share the same physical disks. The drives appear as locally attached drives simultaneously on all machines.
Parallel file system – Several traditional disk servers present a single common file system to a collection of computers. Data is stored and retrieved from multiple disk servers simultaneously.
Storage Depot – Stand-alone storage server designed to provide an interoperable foundation for a wide-area storage infrastructure. These depots are specifically designed to handle petabytes of storage - providing redundancy, tape archiving, and pre-staging of data to multiple sites.
These innovative storage solutions will be discussed in-depth. Detailed comparisons and performance numbers will also be presented.
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