A new revolution in enterprise storage architecture

Abstract

Network attached storage (NAS) and storage area network (SAN) are the enterprise storage architectures that are commonly deployed in data centers. However, as storage demands escalate over time, none of these storage networks support aggressive concurrency and per server throughput requirements for the applications on highly scalable computing clusters. In recent times, efforts have been set to incorporate the strengths of existing storage architectures into a unique framework that accomplished the performance, scalability, manageability, and a high level of data security. The approach has led to the design of novel storage architecture that support next generation object based storage technology. One of the main design features in object based storage architecture is the separation of metadata from the data management. This is to avoid the metadata server (MDS) from becoming the performance bottleneck, as seen in NAS architecture. MDS does not contain any user data. It is essentially used as a global resource for locating objects, mitigating secure access to objects, and assisting objects management. Data are transferred directly between the application servers (also referred as clients) and the object based storage devices (OSD) during its read/write operations without any intervention from MDS. An MDS cluster allows enterprise storages to scale to a very large finite number of objects (possibly 1030) that can be managed simultaneously, and at the same time sustaining their access performance. Object based storage architecture allows application servers to access its storage devices in parallel to cultivate high performance data transfers.