NASA Scientific and Technical Aerospace Reports

optical disk (CD, DVD). While the need for increased storage capacity has never been greater, the inadequacies of traditional
approaches have never been more apparent. This is especially true for fixed-content data: new government regulations and
increasingly competitive market pressures have converged to underscore the importance of finding long-term storage solutions
for fixed-content data that offer ready and secure access, easily scale, and are relatively inexpensive.
Author
Architecture (Computers); Digital Data; Data Storage; Computer Networks
20040121038 Singapore Univ., Singapore
SANSIM: A Platform for Simulation and Design of a Storage Area Network
Zhu, Yao-Long; Wang, Chao-Yang; Xi, Wei-Ya; Zhou, Feng; 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. 373-383; In English; See also 20040121020; No Copyright; Avail: CASI; A03, Hardcopy
Modeling and simulation are flexible and effective tools to design and evaluate the performance of Storage Area Network
(SAN). Fibre Channel (FC) is presently the dominant protocol used in SAN. In this paper, we present a new simulation -
SANSim, developed for modeling and analyzing FC storage network. SANSim includes four main modules: an I/O workload
module, a host module, a storage network module, and a storage system module. SANSim has been validated by comparing
the simulation results with the actual I/O performance of a FC RAM disk connected to a FC network. The simulated results
match the experimental readings within 3%. As an example of applicability, SANSim has been used to study the impact of
link failures on the performance of a FC network with a core/edge topology.
Author
Data Collection Platforms; Simulation; Fibers; Computer Programs
20040121040 San Diego Supercomputer Center, La Jolla, CA, USA
Data Grid Management Systems
Moore, Reagan W.; Jagatheesan, Arun; Rajasekar, Arcot; Wan, Michael; Schroeder, Wayne; 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. 1-15; In English; See also 20040121020
Contract(s)/Grant(s): DE-FC02-01ER-25486; NSF ACI-96-19020; NSF S02-36645; No Copyright; Avail: CASI; A03,
Hardcopy
The ‘Grid’ is an emerging infrastructure for coordinating access across autonomous organizations to distributed,
heterogeneous computation and data resources. Data grids are being built around the world as the next generation data
handling systems for sharing, publishing, and preserving data residing on storage systems located in multiple administrative
domains. A data grid provides logical namespaces for users, digital entities and storage resources to create persistent identifiers
for controlling access, enabling discovery, and managing wide area latencies. This paper introduces data grids and describes
data grid use cases. The relevance of data grids to digital libraries and persistent archives is demonstrated, and research issues
in data grids and grid dataflow management systems are discussed.
Author
Computer Storage Devices; Data Management; Data Storage; Management Systems
20040121041 Panasas, Inc., Fremont, CA, USA
Managing Scalability in Object Storage Systems for HPC Linux Clusters
Welch, Brent; Gibson, Garth; 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. 433-445; In English; See also 20040121020; No Copyright; Avail: CASI; A03, Hardcopy
This paper describes the performance and manageability of scalable storage systems based on Object Storage Devices
(OSD). Object-based storage was invented to provide scalable performance as the storage cluster scales in size. For example,
in our large file tests a 10-OSD system provided 325 MB/sec read bandwidth to 5 clients (from disk), and a 299-OSD system
provided 10,334 MB/sec read bandwidth to 151 clients. This shows linear scaling of 30x speedup with 30x more client demand
and 30x more storage resources. However, the system must not become more difficult to manage as it grows. Otherwise, the
performance benefits can be quickly overshadowed by the administrative burden of managing the system. Instead, the storage
cluster must feel like a single system image from the management perspective, even though it may be internally composed
of 10 s, 100 s or thousands of object storage devices. For the HPC market, which is characterized as having unusually large
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