HPTFS: High performance tape file system
Xianbo Zhang, David H. C. Du, Jim R. Hughes, Ravi Kavuri · 2006
Abstract — Offsite storing and data mirroring are increasingly essential for disaster recovery. Tape backup/archive is still a strong candidate or even a must for some of these applications. The rapid development of Internet and the emerging of low cost high capacity storage devices have created an environment with explosive amount of data and hence have created a higher demand for tape storage systems since tape library provides long lifetime archival and low cost per storage unit [1]–[3]. However, tape storage is harder to use due to its SCSI interface and sequential access nature. The purpose of this project is to provide programmers and end users an easy to use interface while taking the full advantage of high capacity and high streaming speed from modern tape technologies. Modern tape technology can provide high capacity per cartridge (1 TB compressed storage capacity) [4] and high streaming rate (200 MB/s compressed data transfer rate) [5], [6]. We have built a software, called HPTFS (High Performance Tape File System), that mounts a tape as a file system and enables tape write sharing among multiple users by transparently interleaving user data streams to tape. This systems is simple enough that it could be directly built into a tape drive thus completely changing the paradigm on how tape is accessed for the fist time since tape iteself was introduced. As a secondary feature, the software can also support the concept of continuous data protection by simultaneously writing data to both disk and tape providing a seamless support of data mirroring for any user application. We have also evaluated the basic system performance of HPTFS and presented some ideas of further improvements. I.