Abstract
The emergence of network-attached disks provides the phics. possibility of transferring data between the storage system and the client directly. This offers new possibilities in building a distributed storage system. In this thesis, we examine different storage organizations based on network-attached disks and compare the performance of these systems to a traditional system. Trace-driven simulations are used to measure the average response time of the client requests in two different workloads. We show that (a) The advantages of distributing the server's network processing workload to disks may be offset by the decreased cache hit ratios in a file system based on network-attached disks. (b) Performance can be significantly improved in a Web workload. (c) The workload on the server can be decreased considerably. The primary determinants of performance are found to be the percentage of workload that can be distributed to the disks and the impact on the cache hit ratio as a result of distributing the cache memory over multiple disks.
Ma, Gang (1998). An evaluation of the storage systems based on network-attached disks. Master's thesis, Texas A&M University. Available electronically from
https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /ETD -TAMU -1998 -THESIS -M32.