NAS Storage-System Architecture cloud storage challenges

The concept of cloud storage began with a service offered by Amazon (S3), along with its cloud computing products (EC2). Behind Amazon's S3 service, it manages a number of commodity hardware devices and bundles the appropriate software to create a storage pool. Emerging web companies have embraced the product and proposed the term cloud storage and its corresponding concepts.

Cloud storage is a schema, not a service. Whether you own or lease this architecture is a secondary issue. Fundamentally, cloud storage can easily extend cloud capacity and performance by adding standard hardware and access to shared standard networks (public Internet or private intranet). It turns out that managing hundreds of servers makes it feel like a single, large storage pool device is a fairly challenging job. Early vendors, such as Amazon, undertook the task and profited by renting online. Other vendors, such as Google, employ a large number of engineers to implement this management within their firewalls and customize storage nodes to run applications on them. Cloud storage has become a highly disruptive technology in the data center as Moore's Law (Moore's SLaw) drives down the prices of disk and CPU goods.

Over the past decade, the cluster NAS storage system has improved. This article reviews various architectural approaches to building cloud storage for a cloud storage or large-scale scalable NAS storage system architecture, for enterprise IT managers seeking to build private cloud storage to meet their consumption, or for service providers seeking to build public cloud storage products to provide storage in the form of services, These methods are closely related to them. The architecture approach is divided into two categories: one is the architecture through the service, the other is the architecture through software or hardware devices.

The traditional system utilizes tightly coupled symmetric architectures designed to solve the problem of HPC (High performance computing, super Operations) and is now expanding outwards into cloud storage to meet the fast-presenting market demands. The next-generation architecture has adopted a loosely coupled asymmetric architecture that centralizes metadata and control operations, which are not well-suited for high-performance HPC, but are designed to address the bulk storage requirements of cloud deployments. The summary information for the various schemas is as follows:

Tightly coupled symmetric (TCS) Architecture:

The NAS storage System Architecture cloud storage builds a TCS system to address the challenges of single file performance, which limits the development of traditional NAS storage systems. The advantages of HPC systems quickly overwhelm storage because they require a much greater number of single file I/O operations than single device I/O operations. The industry's response to this is to create products that utilize the TCS architecture, many of which are accompanied by distributed lock management (which locks the write operations of different parts of the file) and cache consistency. This solution works well for single file throughput issues, and many HPC customers in several different industries have already adopted this solution. This solution is advanced and requires a certain degree of technical experience to install and use.

Loosely coupled asymmetric (LCA) Architecture:

The NAS storage System Architecture cloud storage LCA systems are scaled out in different ways. Instead of executing a policy to make each node aware of what each action is doing, it uses a central metadata control server outside of a data path. Centralized control offers many benefits, allowing for new levels of expansion:

Storage nodes can focus on the requirement to provide read and write services without the need for acknowledgement from network nodes.

Nodes can take advantage of different hardware CPUs and storage configurations, and still play a role in cloud storage.

Users can adjust cloud storage by taking advantage of hardware performance or virtualization instances.

Eliminating the large amount of state overhead shared between nodes can also eliminate the need for user computers to interconnect, such as Fibre Channel or infiniband, to further reduce costs.

The blending and matching of heterogeneous hardware enables users to expand storage on the scale of the current economy when needed, while providing permanent data availability.

Having centralized metadata means that storage nodes can be rotated for deep application archiving, and metadata is often available on control nodes.