Paper Info
Title
Performance Evaluation of Commodity iSCSI-Based Storage Systems
Abstract
iSCSI is proposed as a possible solution to building future storage systems. However, using iSCSI raises numerous questions about its implications on system performance. This lack of understanding of system I/O behavior in modern and future systems inhibits providing solutions at the architectural and system levels. Our main goals in this work are to understand the behavior of the application server (iSCSI initiator), to evaluate the overhead introduced by iSCSI compared to systems with directly-attached storage, and to provide insight about how future storage systems may be improved. We examine these questions in the context of commodity iSCSI systems that can benefit most from using iSCSI. We use commodity PCs with several disks as storage nodes and a Gigabit Ethernet network as the storage network. On the application server side we use a broad range of benchmarks and applications to evaluate the impact of iSCSI on application and server performance. We instrument the Linux kernel to provide detailed information about I/O activity and the various overheads of kernel I/O layers. Our analysis reveals how iSCSI affects application performance and shows that building next generation, network-based I/O architectures, requires optimizing I/O latency, reducing network and buffer cache related processing in the host CPU, and increasing the sheer network bandwidth to account for consolidation of different types of traffic.
Year
DOI
Venue
2005
10.1109/MSST.2005.23
MSST
Keywords
Field
DocType
commodity iscsi-based storage systems,o latency,performance evaluation,o activity,commodity iscsi system,o architecture,future storage system,o behavior,directly-attached storage,o layer,iscsi initiator,storage network,storage system,kernel,application server,buffer cache,linux,storage area networks,local area networks,next generation networking,system performance,linux kernel,next generation network
HyperSCSI,Disk buffer,Computer science,iSCSI,Local area network,Gigabit Ethernet,Storage area network,Operating system,Linux kernel,Application server
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
0-7695-2318-8
12
0.83
References 
Authors
6
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dimitrios Xinidis1141.22
Angelos Bilas259860.49
Michail D. Flouris31319.38