A COST-EFFECTIVE, HIGH-BANDWIDTH STORAGE ARCHITECTURE

This paper describes the Network-Attached Secure Disk (NASD) storage a rchitecture, prototype implementations of NASD drives, array managemen t our architecture, and three filesystems built on our prototype. NASD provides scalable storage bandwidth without the cost of sewers used p rimarily for transferring delta from peripheral networks (e.g. SCSI) t o client networks (e.g. ethernet). increasing dataset sizes, new attac hment technologies, the convergence of peripheral and interprocessor s witched networks, and the increased availability of on-drive transisto rs motivate and enable this new architecture. NASD is based on four ma in principles: direct transfer to clients, secure interfaces via crypt ographic support, asynchronous non-critical-path oversight, and variab ly-sized data objects. Measurements of our prototype system shout that these services can be cost-effectively integrated into a next generat ion disk drive ASIC. End-to-end measurements of our prototype drive an d filesystems suggest that NASD can support conventional distributed f ilesystems without performance degradation. More importantly, we show scalable bandwidth for NASD-specialized filesystems. Using a parallel data mining application, NASD drives deliver a linear scaling of 6.2 M B/s per client-drive pair tested with up to eight pairs in our lab.