High-speed storage nodes for the cloud

Edwards, Nigel ; Watkins, Mark ; Gates, Matt ; Coles, Alistair ; Deliot, Eric ; Edwards, Aled ; Fischer, Anna ; Goldsack, Patrick ; Hancock, Tom ; McCabe, Donagh ; Reddin, Tim ; Sullivan, JP ; Toft, Peter ; Wilcock, Lawrence

HP Development Company

关键词: Virtualization;    storage;    virtual machines;    cloud computing;    infrastructure as a service;   

RP-ID  :  HPL-2011-70

学科分类：计算机科学（综合）

美国|英语

来源: HP Labs

【 摘 要 】

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 hypervisor. We describe how the storage nodes are incorporated into a heterogeneous Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) consisting of mixed storage and compute nodes.