New Directions in Storage, Hard-disks With Built-in Networking
Patrick Fuhrmann, Y. Kemp, Paul Millar, Tigran Mkrchtyan, Christopher Squires · 2016
The dCache project provides software allowing sites to offer a reliable storage service using heterogeneous storage components, including SSD, HDD and tape.The software provides native support for many protocols and has a number of advanced data-management features that allow scaling into the multi-petabyte capacity domain.Based on recent advances in hard-disks and system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs HGST developed a novel form of hard-disk: a disk that includes both, a network interface and an ARM processor., allowing the individual disk to run an operating system and to communicate with other nodes autonomously using wired Ethernet.No additional hardware or infrastructure is required.The dCache team took advantage of their early access to those devices, investigating a possible deployment in grid and cloud environments.By operating dCache software and observing the system's behavior we investigated how petabytesized storage infrastructures, based on these disks, can be build, even considering changes to the dCache software.We present possible deployment scenarios for those new devices and compare them to existing setups at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) research centre, where direct attached RAID systems are used.The results of our initial investigation are presented along with an outline of future work.