Co-Simulation for Performance Evaluation of an Enterprise's Web Storage Systems

Web storage systems are capable of providing a single storage area for managing multiple types of unstructured information in an enterprise infrastructure. Recently, network storage architectures such as network attached storage (NAS) are emerged as shared, adaptable and high-performance web storage systems for data intensive distributed applications. NAS provides filelevel data storage services to the attached heterogeneous group of clients. Efficient implementations of NAS can have a significant impact on the overall network performance and its workload. In this paper, we have proposed a simulation model integrating NS-2 and Matlab/Simulink to evaluate the performance of NAS workload and its underlying network. NS-2 works as a master simulator, and it is utilized to model and simulate the data transfer over the distributed network. Matlab/Simulink is utilized to model and simulate the data process within the web storage systems. The performance of web storage system is evaluated through the average response time of the clients' requests of the data network before and after implementing NAS. For a small-size network of 100 clients and 4 servers, our simulation results show that NAS implementation improves the average response time of the clients' requests by 31% in comparison to the existing direct attached disks (DAS).