High-speed Storage Nodes for the Cloud
N. Edwards, M. Watkins, M. Gates, Alastair N. Coles, Eric Deliot, A. Edwards, A. Fischer, Patrick Goldsack, T. Hancock, D. McCabe, Tim Reddin, John P Sullivan, Peter Toft, Lawrence Wilcock · 2011
In this paper, we describe an architecture for high-speed storage nodes intended for supporting cloud-based storage I/O intensive applications such as file servers, backup servers and databases. The nodes can host multiple virtual machines each having direct access to a storage array via Single Route I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV). This is done in a way which does not compromise security. We demonstrate that SR-IOV imposes negligible overhead for storage I/O and provides the hosted virtual machines with four times the storage I/O bandwidth than is available from the same hardware when I/O is redirected through the hyper visor. We describe how the storage nodes are incorporated into a heterogeneous Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consisting of mixed storage and compute nodes.