Using an Object-Based Active Storage Framework to Improve Parallel Storage Systems

Abstract

Modern processors have improved rapidly over recent decades and disk storage has failed to keep pace with this development rate. Object-based storage was proposed as an alternative interface in order to close the gap between the processing units and the storage components. Object-based storage simplifies data representation and increases the intelligence of storage components by offloading data management tasks from the host filesystem to the storage. However, we believe that objectbased storage features have not been fully explored. In this work, we first introduce an active storage framework we developed for an object-based storage platform. Specifically, we show how to enable active storage by exploiting the object-based storage features. Then, we discuss how the active storage framework can be used in order to improve the scalability, reliability and usability of parallel storage systems.

Performance enhancements in large scale storage systems

“…Based on this QoS hint, the drive can make decisions on whether to place the application data on the solid state storage or the magnetic media. Past work have also been done in the area of code execution or processing on the drive itself [129], [49]. Such code execution within the drive itself becomes more efficient on a hybrid device since the latencies to access data on the internal solid state storage is much lower than the magnetic media.…”