A case for network-centric buffer cache organization

The emergence of clustered and networked storage architecture gives rise to a new type of server which acts as a data conduit over the network for remotely stored data. These servers, which we call pass-through servers, are mainly responsible for passing the data through them without interpreting it in any way. In this paper, we put forward a scheme of network-centric buffer cache management. This scheme can facilitate the data transmission through pass-through servers by avoiding redundant data copying, and by caching the data in a network-ready form, while having no modifications to the existing buffer cache organization. The performance measurement on an NFS server, using iSCSI storage, running on Linux, with this scheme shows throughput improvement of more than 50% compared to an NFS server on common Linux, while consuming about 40% less CPU resource.