uStorage - A Storage Architecture to Provide Block-Level Storage Through Object-Based Storage

Abstract

Block-level Storage is widely used to support heavy workloads. It can be directly accessed by the operating system, but it faces some durability issues, hardware limitations and performance degradation in geographically distributed systems. Object-based Storage Device (OSD) is a data storage concept widely used to support write-once-read-many (WORM) systems. Because OSD contains data, metadata and an unique identifier, it becomes very powerful and customizable. OSDs are ideal for solving the increasing problems of data growth and resilience requirements while mitigating costs. This paper describes a scalable storage architecture that uses OSD from a distributed P2P Cloud Storage system and delivers a Block-level Storage layer to the user. This architecture combines the advantages of the replication, reliability, and scalability of a OSD on commodity hardware with the simplicity of raw block for data-intensive workload. We retrieve data from the OSD in a set of blocks called buckets, allowing read-ahead operations to improve the performance of the raw block layer. Through this architecture we show the possibility of using OSD on the back end and deliver a storage layer based on raw blocks with better performance to the end user. We evaluated the proposed architecture based on the cache behavior to understand non-functional properties. Experiments were performed with different cache sizes. High throughput performance was measured for heavy workloads at the two storage layers.

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