Paper 5
Low-Power Fault-Tolerant Real-Time Network-Attached Storage
Device
Tzi-cker Chiueh
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Phoenix is a real-time network-attached storage device (NASD)
that guarantees real-time data delivery to network clients even across single disk failure. The service interfaces that
Phoenix provides are best-effort/real-time reads/writes based on unique object
identifiers and block offsets. Data retrieval from Phoenix can be serviced in server push or client pull modes.
Phoenix's real-time disk subsystem performance results from a standard cycle-based scan-order disk scheduling mechanism.
However, the disk I/O cycle of Phoenix is either completely active or completely idle. This on-off disk scheduling model
effectively reduces the power consumption of the disk subsystem, without increasing the buffer size requirement.
Phoenix also exploits unused disk storage space and maintains additional redundancy beyond the generic RAID5-style parity.
This extra redundancy, typically in the form of block replication, reduces the time to reconstruct the data on the failed disk.
This talk presents the design and implementation of Phoenix, one of the first, if not the first, NASDs that support
fault-tolerant, real-time, and low-power network storage service, and a detailed performance evaluation of the Phoenix prototype
based on Linux. I will also talk briefly about the evolution of the Phoenix project, and the on-going research on large-scale
virtual disk architecture.