Highly concurrent shared storage

Abstract

Switched system-area networks enable thousands of storage devices to be shared and directly accessed by end hosts, promising databases and file systems highly scalable, reliable storage. In such systems, hosts perform access tasks (read and write) and management tasks (storage migration and reconstruction of data on failed devices.) Each task translates into multiple phases of low-level device I/Os, so that concurrent host tasks accessing shared devices can corrupt redundancy codes and cause hosts to read inconsistent data. Concurrent control protocols that scale to large system sizes are required in order to coordinate on-line storage management and access tasks. In this paper we identify, the tasks that storage controllers must perform, and propose an approach which allows these tasks to be composed from basic operations-called base storage transactions (BSTs)-such that correctness requires only the serializability of the BSTs and not of the parent tasks. We present highly scalable distributed protocols which exploit storage technology trends and BST properties to achieve serializability while coming within a few percent of ideal performance.