NASA Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports

Performance has always come at a steep cost in the world of enterprise storage, with flexibility often taking a back seat
when it comes to IT purchasing decisions. In fact, storage has typically been bought and deployed as a one size fits all solution,
regardless of the kinds of applications the network is running. Such an approach has required multiple servers to address
multiple needs, resulting in significantly higher costs and a much greater degree of management complexity. BlueArc’s
Multi-Tiered Storage (MTS) solution changes all this. MTS offers storage performance and consolidation while supporting
different types of storage within the same network-attached storage (NAS)-based system, according to the specific
requirements of the applications. For the first time, a combination of high-performance online, moderate performance nearline
and infrequently accessed archival data can be configured in a single, seamless NAS platform a BlueArc SiliconServer. This
paper looks at the issues surrounding today’s growing storage needs in enterprise and project applications, examines the need
for a multi-tier storage solution, explains BlueArc’s Multi-Tiered storage platform and demonstrates how the system is applied
to storage applications.
Author
Data Storage; On-Line Systems; Computer Networks; Architecture (Computers)
20040121030 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, USA
Interconnection Architectures for Petabyte-Scale High-Performance Storage Systems
Hospodor, Andy D.; Miller, Ethan L.; NASA/IEEE MSST 2004 Twelfth NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems
and Technologies in cooperation with the Twenty-First IEEE Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies; April
2004, pp. 273-281; In English; See also 20040121020
Contract(s)/Grant(s): B520714; No Copyright; Avail: CASI; A02, Hardcopy
As demand for storage bandwidth and capacity grows, designers have proposed the construction of petabytescale storage
systems. Rather than relying upon a few very large storage arrays, these petabyte-scale systems have thousands of individual
disks working together to provide aggregate storage system bandwidth exceeding 100GB/s. However, providing this
bandwidth to storage system clients becomes difficult due to limits in network technology. This paper discusses different
interconnection topologies for large disk-based systems, drawing on previous experience from the parallel computing
community. By choosing the right network, storage system designers can eliminate the need for expensive high-bandwidth
communication links and provide a highly-redundant network resilient against single node failures. We analyze several
different topology choices and explore the tradeoffs between cost and performance. Using simulations, we uncover potential
pitfalls, such as the placement of connections between the storage system network and its clients, that may arise when
designing such a large system.
Author
Parallel Processing (Computers); Topology; Architecture (Computers); Data Storage; Computer Systems Performance
20040121035 McDATA Corp., Broomfield, CO, USA
Fibre Channel and IP SAN Integration
Yang, Henry; NASA/IEEE MSST 2004 Twelfth NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies in
cooperation with the Twenty-First IEEE Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies; April 2004, pp. 31-45; In
English; See also 20040121020; No Copyright; Avail: CASI; A03, Hardcopy
The maturity and mission-critical deployment of Fibre Channel (FC) in storage area networks (SANs) creates a unique
class of multi-terabit networks with demanding throughput, latency, scalability, robustness, and availability requirements. This
paper reviews the state of and critical system-level requirements for SANs. It describes how Internet SCSI (iSCSI), FC over
IP (FCIP), and Internet FC Protocol (iFCP) integrate with FC SANs and discusses associated benefits and challenges. Finally,
the paper examines case studies in performance and protocol tuning in high-speed, long-delay networks, which are
increasingly critical for FC-to-IP integration opportunities and challenges.
Author
Internets; High Speed; Deployment; Robustness (Mathematics)
20040121036 Archivas, Inc., Waltham, MA, USA
H-RAIN: An Architecture for Future-Proofing Digital Archives
Rodriguez, Andres; Orenstein, Jack; NASA/IEEE MSST 2004 Twelfth NASA Goddard Conference on Mass Storage Systems
and Technologies in cooperation with the Twenty-First IEEE Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies; April
2004, pp. 415-420; In English; See also 20040121020; No Copyright; Avail: CASI; A02, Hardcopy
Traditionally, systems for large-scale data storage have been based on removable media such as tape and, more recently,
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