High-speed Storage Nodes for the Cloud

Author

Edwards, Nigel ; Watkins, Mark ; Gates, Matt ; Coles, Alistair ; Deliot, Eric ; Edwards, Aled ; Fischer, Anna ; Goldsack, Patrick ; Hancock, Tom ; McCabe, D. ; Reddin, Tim ; Sullivan, JP ; Toft, Peter ; Wilcock, Lawrence

Author_Institution

Hewlett-Packard, Bristol, UK

fYear

2011

fDate

5-8 Dec. 2011

Firstpage

25

Lastpage

32

Abstract

In this paper, we describe an architecture for high-speed storage nodes intended for supporting cloud-based storage I/O intensive applications such as file servers, backup servers and databases. The nodes can host multiple virtual machines each having direct access to a storage array via Single Route I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV). This is done in a way which does not compromise security. We demonstrate that SR-IOV imposes negligible overhead for storage I/O and provides the hosted virtual machines with four times the storage I/O bandwidth than is available from the same hardware when I/O is redirected through the hyper visor. We describe how the storage nodes are incorporated into a heterogeneous Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consisting of mixed storage and compute nodes.

Keywords

cloud computing; virtual machines; virtual storage; virtualisation; I-O intensive application; cloud based storage; heterogeneous infrastructure as a service; high speed storage node; hypervisor; single route I-O virtualization; storage I-O bandwidth; storage array; virtual machines; Blades; Computer architecture; Hardware; Security; Servers; Synthetic aperture sonar; Virtual machining; cloud computing; infrastructure as a service; storage; virtual machines; virtualization;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC), 2011 Fourth IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Victoria, NSW

Print_ISBN

978-1-4577-2116-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/UCC.2011.14

Filename

6123477