Wide-area-distributed disaster-tolerant file system for multimedia data storage
Setsuko Murata, Shigetaro Iwatsu, Masahiro Ueno, Nobuyoshi Izawa, Katsunori Ishii · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1997
We propose a new disaster-tolerant file system for multimedia data storage. To protect against natural disasters by eliminating the possibility of simultaneous failure in multiple disks constituting a RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks) system, our proposed file system features a RAID system with member disks spatially distributed over a wide area. The Fiber Channel standard has the potential to create an up to 10-km separation of member disks by using single-mode optical fiber cables. The prototype system of wide-area distributed file (WDF) consisting of a layered structure of RAID level 1 and RAID level 0 was tested. It has its entire data in a local disk and its mirroring data striped into two fiber-channel-connected disks by using optical fiber cables. The effect of underlying software modules and hardware components on its read/write performance was investigated. Compared with a file system using a local disk, the prototype WDF system shows equivalent read performance by directing all reads to its local disk and its write performance is almost 20$% lower. An on-line transaction processing (OLTP) benchmark was also executed. The WDF system achieved a throughput (transactions per second) similar to that of the file system using a local disk.