A Design Model for NAS System and Performance Evaluation
Jing Zhou · Mini-micro Systems · 2003
In the traditional storage system view, storage devices are coupled to the system through IDE/SCSI bus, the function for server is to storage and forward. In this architecture I/O bus may be the bottleneck of whole system. With the dramatic shift towards distributed computing, NAS offers new possibilities in building a distributed storage system. It provides direct data transferring between the clients and storage system. In this paper, we analyzed character of data transferring based on network attached system, then provide a realize model for NAS system design. Simultaneously, this paper investigates how effectively to organize a storage system based on network attached system and compared their performance with a traditional storage system. We studied that the use of network-attached system can substantially reduce the workload at the file server, and it can effectively utilize the enhancements at the disk performance, such as disk number, MIPS and cache size.