Virtual Large-Scale Disk Base on PC Grid
Erianto Chai, Katsuyoshi Matsumoto, Minoru Uehara, Hideki Mori · 2009
Abstract. With the recent flood of data, one of the major issues is the storage thereof. Although commodity HDDs are now very cheap, appliance storage systems are still relatively expensive. As a result, we developed the VLSD (Virtual Large-Scale Disk) toolkit to assist in the construction of large-scale storage using only cheap commodity hardware and software. As an experiment in using the VLSD toolkit, storage was created for an educational environment. This paper presents an evaluation of the performance of the storage by performing a GCC build on the trial production storage system both during trouble-free operation and failure. Key words: virtual large-scale disk; grid; open source; raid; fault tolerance 1. Introduction. Large-scale storage has become a necessity as we are flooded with information. Largescale storage is needed for research in areas involving large amounts of data, such as the Human Genome Project or calculation engineering. In addition, a large amount of data is used privately for video and music storage, etc. Virtual machines such as VMware and Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 allow students to learn how to maintain Linux servers safely and are very useful in higher education, but they have large disk space requirements. VMware