ABSTRACT

Appears in the Proceedings of USENIX 1999, Linux Workshop, Monterey, CA, June 9 - 11, 1999

NASD Scalable Storage Systems

Garth A. Gibson*, David F. Nagle**, William Courtright II*, Nat Lanza*, Paul Mazaitis*,
Marc Unangst*, Jim Zelenka*

School of Computer Science*
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering**
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/NASD

The goal of CMU's Network-Attached Secure Disks (NASD) project is to define the next era of storage system interfaces and architectures. To encourage industry standardization of a compliant storage device/subsystem interface, we are working closely with the National Storage Industry Conworking group on network-attached storage. Our experimental demonstration of the NASD interface's value is device and filesystem prototype software that delivers the scalability inherent in a NASD storage architecture. To engage the academic community and to provide a reference implementation for industry development, CMU is releasing its Linux and Digital UNIX ports of this software. In this paper, we overview the NASD scalable storage architecture and the code-base we are releasing for Linux.

FULL PAPER: pdf / postscript