Multiple Micro Virtual Disks for Constructing Large-scale Storage

Recently the demand for low cost, large-scale storage has risen. We developed the VLSD (virtual large scale disk) toolkit for constructing virtual disk based distributed storage, by aggregating the free space of individual disks. However, the single file server in the prototype system becomes a bottleneck and is the only point of failure. Thus, to improve reliability and performance, we propose the MMVD (multiple micro virtual disks) method, in which large-scale storage consists of many small file servers. With MMVD, there is neither a single point of failure, nor a bottleneck because multiple file servers manage many small disks. In addition, a MMVD system offers increased reliability because it reduces the MTTR.