Design and implementation of a new special storage server

摘要

To improve I/O speed and system performance for network storage devices, we have designed a new special storage server that is an iSCSI-based network-attached storage server (iSCSI-based network-attached storge server, for short iNAS). Firstly, the iNAS can provide both the file I/O and the block I/O services by an iSCSI module, and it converges with the NAS and the SAN (storage area network). Secondly, the iNAS greatly improves the I/O speed by the direct data access (zero copy) between the RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) controller and the user-level memory. Thirdly, the iNAS integrates the multi-RAID for a single storage pool by a multi-stage stripping device driver, and it implements the storage virtualization. In the experiments, the iNAS has ultra-high-throughput for both the file I/O requests and the block I/O requests.