Highly-available, scalable network storage

Abstract

The ideal storage system is always available, is incrementally expandable, scales in performance as new components are added and requires no management. Existing storage systems are far from this ideal. The recent introduction of low-cost, scalable, high-performance networks allows us to re-examine the way we build storage systems and to investigate storage architectures that bring us closer to the ideal storage system. This document examines some of the issues and ideas in building such storage systems and describes our first scalable storage prototype.