DRALIC: A Peer-to-Peer Storage Architecture

摘要

The ideal storage system should provide high availability, reliability, and unlimited performance and capacity with minimal management. This paper describes the architecture and performance of DRALIC―Distributed RAid and Location Independent Caching. DRALIC is a peer-to-peer storage architecture that attempts to make this ideal storage into practice. The main idea of DRALIC is to combine or bridge the disk controller and network controller of existing PCs interconnected by a high-speed LAN switch. To demonstrate our approach, we have implemented a simulator called DralicSim based on a set of PCs running Windows NT. Preliminary performance measurements suggest that our architecture achieves its goal.