Active storage using object-based devices

Abstract

The increasing performance and decreasing cost of processors and memory are causing system intelligence to move from the CPU to peripherals such as disk drives. Storage system designers are using this trend toward excessive computation capability to perform more complex processing and optimizations directly inside the storage devices. Such kind of optimizations have been performed only at low levels of the storage protocol. Another factor to consider is the current trends in storage density, mechanics, and electronics, which are eliminating the bottleneck encountered while moving data off the media, and putting pressure on interconnects and host processors to move data more efficiently. Previous work on active storage has taken advantage of the extra processing power on individual disk drives to run application-level code. This idea of moving portions of an applicationpsilas processing to run directly at disk drives can dramatically reduce data traffic and take advantage of the parallel storage already present in large systems today. This paper aims at demonstrating active storage on an iSCSI OSD standards-based object oriented framework.