SAN-MDS: A High Performance Disk Based on Memory Device for SAN

Improving the performance and usability of storage systems has been a popular subject in data storage research. Memory, disks and networks are the three most important components in a network storage system. However, the development of these three is unbalanced. Improvements in memory technology will double memory capacity within 18 months according to Moore´s Law. The network transfer speed is growing fast too. But advances in disk performance have been slow. Aiming at this problem, this paper proposes a method to create virtual disks the memory of various servers on network storage clusters. Furthermore, a high performance and platform-compatible memory disk - SAN-MDS (SAN memory disk system) is presented. Experimental results show that SAN-MDS can effectively improve the network storage systems´ performance in executing write (especially synchronous write) operations and decrease write latency