Server-Side Efficient Parity Generation for Cluster-Wide RAID System

Exascale computing requires storage systems to provide both reliability and performance, which are in the relationship of trade-off. This paper presents a method to build a zero-overhead network storage system (Cluster-wide RAID), which consists of active storage nodes. Active storage nodes themselves have an ability to process data blocks and our proposed method utilizes them to generate parity blocks. In other words, our proposed method moves the parity calculation process to server-side from client-side. Our implementation of the proposed method utilizes InfiniBand remote direct memory access (RDMA), which shows the significant performance improement of RAID-5 write. Especially, the performance of RAID-5 is almost same as RAID-0 (no redundancy). It means that the proposed method can add redundancy to network storage systems without performance degradation.