A Novel Storage Virtualization Scheme for Network Storage Systems

Abstract

The network storage systems are generally composed of clients, storage servers and metadata servers. In this paper, we proposed a novel storage virtualization (NSV) scheme which is capable of alleviating the heavy load of metadata server, guaranteeing the storage quality of service and dynamically adapting storage resources. The metadata server automatically constructs a dedicated storage cluster according to various requirements of storage quality of service. The storage cluster may consist of one to many storage servers which includes one master storage server and zero to many slave storage servers. In other words, a network storage system consists of at least one storage cluster. The requests of each client are forwarded to corresponding master storage server within a specific storage cluster. In addition, the master storage server determines the best storage server which handles the requests based on the conditions of storage servers. Next, the requests will be redirected to the selected storage server. Finally, the responses are directly transmitted to the client.