Storage System Architecture Research Articles

Gemini: A Novel Hardware and Software Implementation of High-performance PCIe SSD

In the era of big data, high-bandwidth and high-concurrency architecture of storage systems is urgently needed. Due to the superiority in power consumption, random access rate and shock resistance, NAND flash memory is popularly adopted in enterprise-class storage systems, and gradually takes the place of traditional hard disk. However, this kind of superiority is not off-the-shelf. Several factors, such as out-of-place update and limited erase/program cycles, have hindered the applicability of flash memory in existing storage systems. Therefore, to fully exploit flash memory’s advantages, this paper proposes a high-performance PCIe SSD, Gemini, and depicts its principles in hardware and software implementation. Our proposed Gemini features several hardware and software optimizations, including PBFTL (the page to block mapping FTL), Dysource (a synchronous-interface flash channel controller with the out-of-order scheduling strategy), a customized I/O stack, the scatter/gather DMA and the multi-queue architecture. What’s more, an FPGA-based prototype of Gemini with 2 TB storage capacity is implemented for verification. In experiment, Gemini achieves a maximum read bandwidth of 3.6 GB/s and a maximum write bandwidth of 1.08 GB/s for 64 KB data access. It can also provide remarkable processing rates over 580,000 IOPS and 270,000 IOPS, with regard to 4 KB random read and write respectively.

The Architecture of High-Capacity Storage Systems

The computing industry is one of the fastest growing industries and it is caused by the rapid progression of computer hardware and software technological developments. The high-capacity storage systems become the important element of the network architectures. The network architectures of high-capacity storage systems can be developed by using various, different techniques. The present paper aims to give a review about the storage systems architecture, systematize the various types of connection, and present the significance of virtualization. Based on industry specific literature and on own research, the present paper sets up a clear systematization of these techniques by providing a brief summary of their essence, while also providing examples of their application in different network storages. The present article also provides an insight into the topic of the different connecting types of network systems, while highlighting the importance of virtualization and application of the iSCSI technology. After the explanation of the challenge of redundancies in storage systems, the author outlines the importance of using RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) technology for handling the issue of redundancy

Energy Sharing Control Scheme for State-of-Charge Balancing of Distributed Battery Energy Storage System

This paper presents an energy sharing state-of-charge (SOC) balancing control scheme based on a distributed battery energy storage system architecture where the cell balancing system and the dc bus voltage regulation system are combined into a single system. The battery cells are decoupled from one another by connecting each cell with a small lower power dc-dc power converter. The small power converters are utilized to achieve both SOC balancing between the battery cells and dc bus voltage regulation at the same time. The battery cells' SOC imbalance issue is addressed from the root by using the energy sharing concept to automatically adjust the discharge/charge rate of each cell while maintaining a regulated dc bus voltage. Consequently, there is no need to transfer the excess energy between the cells for SOC balancing. The theoretical basis and experimental prototype results are provided to illustrate and validate the proposed energy sharing controller.

Architecture and Implementation of a Scalable Sensor Data Storage and Analysis System Using Cloud Computing and Big Data Technologies

Sensors are becoming ubiquitous. From almost any type of industrial applications to intelligent vehicles, smart city applications, and healthcare applications, we see a steady growth of the usage of various types of sensors. The rate of increase in the amount of data produced by these sensors is much more dramatic since sensors usually continuously produce data. It becomes crucial for these data to be stored for future reference and to be analyzed for finding valuable information, such as fault diagnosis information. In this paper we describe a scalable and distributed architecture for sensor data collection, storage, and analysis. The system uses several open source technologies and runs on a cluster of virtual servers. We use GPS sensors as data source and run machine-learning algorithms for data analysis.

A series flywheel architecture for power levelling and mitigation of DC voltage transients in multi‐terminal HVDC grids

This study proposes a new architecture of flywheel energy storage system (FESS) which can be implemented at generating unit (GU) level (e.g. wind turbine) or scaled up for application in grid-side converter (GSC) stations of a multi-terminal direct current (MTDC) system. The proposed architecture suppresses DC voltage leaps under grid faults, and performs power levelling duty at grid connection points. When implemented at GU level, the proposed FESS features a doubly-fed induction machine (DFIM) – the flywheel machine – where its six stator winding terminals are connected in series between the grid and the GSC. The flywheel converter is of partial power rating, and is connected to the DFIM rotor. When employed at an MTDC GSC station, several submodules are connected to build an FESS station. The study proposes the control concept and the general topology of the FESS station. The performance parameters of the system are tested under normal and abnormal operating conditions. Results and analyses indicate smooth dynamic operation, the economic advantage and the improved fault ride-through capability because of the proposed system.

Skewly replicating hot data to construct a power-efficient storage cluster

The exponential data growth is presenting challenges to traditional storage systems. Component-based cluster storage systems, due to their high scalability, are becoming the architecture of next generation storage systems. Cluster storage systems often use data replication to ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and load balance. However, this kind of data replication not only consumes a large amount of storage resources, but also generates more energy consumption. This paper presents a power-aware data replication strategy by leveraging data access behavior. This strategy uses 80/20 rule (80% of the data accesses often go to 20% of the storage space) to skewly replicate only a small amount of frequently accessed data. Furthermore, the storage nodes are divided into a hot node set and a cold node set. Hot nodes, which store a small amount of hot data copies, are always in an active state to guarantee the QoS of the system. The cold nodes which store a large volume of infrequently accessed cold data are placed in a low-power state, thus reducing the energy consumption of the cluster storage system. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy can effectively reduce the resource and energy consumption of the system, while ensuring system performance.

Cloud-Sea Computing Systems: Towards Thousand-Fold Improvement in Performance per Watt for the Coming Zettabyte Era

We are entering a new era of computing, characterized by the need to handle over one zettabyte (1021 bytes, or ZB) of data. The world’s capacities to sense, transmit, store, and process information need to grow three orders of magnitude, while maintain an energy consumption level similar to that of the year 2010. In other words, we need to produce thousand-fold improvement in performance per watt. To face this challenge, in 2012 the Chinese Academy of Sciences launched a 10-year strategic priority research initiative called the Next Generation Information and Communication Technology initiative (the NICT initiative). A research thrust of the NICT program is the Cloud-Sea Computing Systems project. The main idea is to augment conventional cloud computing by cooperation and integration of the cloud-side systems and the sea-side systems, where the "sea-side" refers to an augmented client side consisting of human facing and physical world facing devices and subsystems. The Cloud-Sea Computing Systems project consists of four research tasks: a new computing model called REST 2.0 which extends the REST (representational state transfer) architectural style of Web computing to cloud-sea computing, a three-tier storage system architecture capable of managing ZB of data, a billion-thread datacenter server with high energy efficiency, and an elastic processor aiming at energy efficiency of one trillion operations per second per watt. This special section contains 12 papers produced by the Cloud-Sea Computing Systems project team, presenting research results relating to sensing and REST 2.0, the elastic processor, the hyperparallel server, and the cloud-sea storage.

The Architecture Design of Information Dispersed Storage System Based on the RAIC

For the traditional RAID technology, the single controller controls all the disks, once it fails, and it can easily lead to paralysis of the entire storage system, this paper proposes an approach which is the information dispersed storage system architecture model based on the RAIC. The RAIC storage system uses the scattered information and the cloud storage technology, thus it increases the overall storage system reliability, availability and security.

A Novel Cloud Storage System with Support of Sensitive Data Application

Most users are willing to store their data in the cloud storage system and use many facilities of cloud. But their sensitive data applications faces with potential serious security threats. In this paper, security requirements of sensitive data application in the cloud are analyzed and improved structure for the typical cloud storage system architecture is proposed. The hardware USB-Key is used in the proposed architecture for purpose of enhancing security of user identity and interaction security between the users and the cloud storage system. Moreover, drawn from the idea of data active protection, a data security container is introduced in the system to enhance the security of the data transmission process; by encapsulating the encrypted data, increasing appropriate access control and data management functions. The static data blocks are replaced with a dynamic executable data security container. Then, an enhanced security architecture for software of cloud storage terminal is proposed for more adaptation with the user's specific requirements, and its functions and components can be customizable. Moreover, the proposed architecture have capability of detecting whether the execution environment is according with the pre-defined environment requirements.

Research of Distributed Cache Technology Based on Cloud Computing

Cloud storage, data storage means occurring in recent years is based on cloud computing technology. It is the inevitable trend of data storage in the future. The article describes the definition and characteristics of cloud computing and design a generic cloud computing architecture, given its storage technology for cloud computing, cloud storage system architecture model. At last, the paper prospects the tendency of cloud computing and its storage technology.

Tiered Adaptive Large-Scale Storage System with High Performance

There are various calculations, transmission, and storage devices in terms of performance or reliability characteristics in great physical differences exist of large-scale cluster storage systems. Meanwhile, the actual traffic load data access for storage devices is also not uniform in space and time and there is a big difference. It is unrealistic and unwise if all the data stored on the high-performance devices. In order to resolve this problem effectively, we propose large-scale adaptive tiered storage system architecture in which structure can carry out effective monitoring access to the load and adapting allocation of storage resources based on the application environment. This can fulfill the full potential to the advantages of high-performance storage nodes to improve the performance of large-scale clustered storage systems.

Electrical Double-Layer Capacitors in Hybrid Topologies —Assessment and Evaluation of Their Performance

PHEVs and BEVs make use of battery cells optimized for high energy rather than for high power. This means that the power abilities of these batteries are limited. In order to enhance their performance, a hybrid Rechargeable Energy Storage System (RESS) architecture can be used combining batteries with electrical-double layer capacitors (EDLCs). Such a hybridized architecture can be accomplished using passive or active systems. In this paper, the characteristics of these topologies have been analyzed and compared based on a newly developed hybridization simulation tool for association of lithium-ion batteries and EDLCs. The analysis shows that the beneficial impact of the EDLCs brings about enhanced battery performances in terms of energy efficiency and voltage drops, rather than extension of vehicle range. These issues have been particularly studied for the passive and active hybrid topologies. The classical passive and active topologies being expensive and less beneficial in term of cost, volume and weight, a new hybrid configuration based on the parallel combination of lithium-ion and EDLCs on cell level has been proposed in this article. This topology allows reducing cost, volume, and weight and system complexity in a significant way. Furthermore, a number of experimental setups have illustrated the power of the novel topology in terms of battery capacity increase and power capabilities during charging and discharging. Finally, a unique cycle life test campaign demonstrated that the lifetime of highly optimized lithium-ion batteries can be extended up to 30%–40%.

Storage System Architecture for Data Centers of the Future

Storage System Architecture for Data Centers of the Future

PC-Cluster Based Storage System Architecture for Cloud Storage

Design and architecture of cloud storage system plays a vital role in cloud computing infrastructure in order to improve the storage capacity as well as cost effectiveness. Usually cloud storage system provides users to efficient storage space with elasticity feature. One of the challenges of cloud storage system is difficult to balance the providing huge elastic capacity of storage and investment of expensive cost for it. In order to solve this issue in the cloud storage infrastructure, low cost PC cluster based storage server is configured to be activated for large amount of data to provide cloud users. Moreover, one of the contributions of this system is proposed an analytical model using M/M/1 queuing network model, which is modelled on intended architecture to provide better response time, utilization of storage as well as pending time when the system is running. According to the analytical result on experimental testing, the storage can be utilized more than 90% of storage space. In this paper, two parts have been described such as (i) design and architecture of PC cluster based cloud storage system. On this system, related to cloud applications, services configurations are explained in detailed. (ii) Analytical model has been enhanced to be increased the storage utilization on the target architecture.

Increasing the efficiency of tape-based storage backends

HSM systems such as the CERN's Advanced STORage manager (CASTOR) [1] are responsible for storing Petabytes of data which is first cached on disk and then persistently stored on tape media. The contents of these tapes are regularly repacked from older, lower-density media to new-generation, higher-density media in order to free up physical space and ensure long term data integrity and availability. With the evolution of price decay and higher capacity of disk (and flash memory) based storage, our future vision for tape usage is to move away from serving on demand, random, per-file access to non-disk cached files, and to move towards loosely coupled, efficient bulk data transfers where large-volume data sets are stored and retrieved in aggregations, fully exploiting the stream-based nature of tape media. Mechanisms for grouped migration policies and priorities have been implemented, and an innovative tape format optimized for data aggregations is being developed. This new tape format will also allow for increasing the performance of repacking data from old to newer generation tape media with substantially reduced hardware costs. In this paper, we will describe the improvements for migration policies and priorities, as well as the proposed tape format and the changes which will be applied to the architecture of the CASTOR mass storage system.

Popular Backup/Archival Service and its Application for the Archival of the Network Traffic in the PIONIER Academic Network

This paper presents the popular backup/archival service developed and operated in Poland by members of the PIONIER network consortium and its example application for outsourcing of the archival of the network traffic in the national academic network. The service is built upon the National Data Storage (NDS) system architecture deployed in the redundant, high-end, geographically distributed infrastructure of servers, network and data storage systems built within the confines of the PLATON project. The details of the NDS architecture and its features are discussed in the paper including the system components, their functionality and the system scalability aspects. The paper also presents how the NDS architecture is deployed in the data storage infrastructure of the PLATON project, with an extensive usage of servers and storage virtualization technologies. We discuss how the NDS system instantiation allows for flexible set up of the multiple instances of the popular backup/archival service, which can address various, often contradictory requirements of the service users, while sharing a common pool of physical resources. As an example the system set up for outsourcing the archival of the PIONIER network traffic is presented.

Research on Storage System Architecture of the Intelligent Network Disk(IND)

In this paper,some problems on storage system architecture of computer network are analyzed,a novel storage system architecture of the Intelligent Network Disk(IND)is presented.The internal read and write control algorithms,the tolerant-fault strategies,and the workload balance algorithms for the IND storage system,are all described in detail.Also a basic experimental system of the IND storage architecture has been constructed.Since each IND of the IND storage system is linked directly to the high LAN,some INDs can form a network cluster of storage system.And,it will provide a virtual huge storage system for users.In addition,as each IND has some intelligence,the IND storage system is a flexible Intelligent Network Storage System.

Research on Storage System Architecture of the Intelligent Network Disk(IND)

In this paper,some problems on storage system architecture of computer network are analyzed,a novel storage system architecture of the Intelligent Network Disk(IND)is presented.The internal read and write control algorithms,the tolerant-fault strategies,and the workload balance algorithms for the IND storage system,are all described in detail.Also a basic experimental system of the IND storage architecture has been constructed.Since each IND of the IND storage system is linked directly to the high LAN,some INDs can form a network cluster of storage system.And,it will provide a virtual huge storage system for users.In addition,as each IND has some intelligence,the IND storage system is a flexible Intelligent Network Storage System.

A novel distributed architecture of large-scale multimedia storage system using autonomous object-based storage devices

In a large-scale multimedia storage system (LMSS) where the user requests for different multimedia objects may have different demands, placement and replication of the objects is an important factor, as it may result in an imbalance in loading across the system. Since replica management and load balancing is a crucial issue in multimedia systems, normally this problem is handled by centralized servers, e.g., metadata servers (MDS) in distributed file systems. Each object-based storage device (OSD) responds to the requests coming from the centralized servers independently and has no communication with other OSDs among the system. In this paper, we design a novel distributed architecture of LMSS, in which the OSDs have some kind of intelligences and can cooperate to achieve a high performance. Such an OSD, named as autonomous object-based storage device (AOSD), can replicate the objects to and balance the requests among other AOSDs, and handle fail-over and recovery autonomously. In the proposed architecture, we move the request balancing from centralized MDS to AOSDs and make the system more scalable, flexible, and robust. Based on the proposed architecture, we propose two different object replication and load balancing algorithms, named as “Minimum Average Waiting Time” (MAWT) and “One of the Best Two Choices” (OBTC), respectively. We validate the performance of the algorithms via rigorous simulations with respect to several influencing factors. Our findings conclusively demonstrate that the proposed architecture minimizes the average waiting time and at the same time carries out load balancing across servers.

O2S2

Object based storage devices (OSDs) elevate the level of abstraction presented to clients, thereby permitting them to offer methods for managing, sharing, and securing information that go beyond those offered by block-based stores. The Object-Oriented Storage System (O2S2) architecture presented and evaluated in this paper provides object-based storage in a virtualized environment. This service provides a virtual object-based storage device (vOSD) to virtual machines. The use of vOSDs permits the service provider, i.e., the vOSD storage domain , to offer to guest virtual machines new methods for resource management and consolidation Methods demonstrated in this paper include improved support for access control and for heterogeneity of storage devices. A prototype PVFS-based O2S2 implementation demonstrates that its enhanced services can be provided at low cost, enabled in part by the efficient utilization of otherwise idle storage domain resources.