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This report documents the accomplishments of a Phase I project whose purpose was to demonstrate feasibility of developing inexpensive and fast data storage using multi-host Fibre Channel disk clusters. In Phase I, a working file system called ZFS was developed and tested. The ZFS approach was designed to be suited for high energy physics applications, but is general and flexible enough to be useful for other high-volume applications. The ZFS approach, which borrows from the networking concept of cut-through routing, uses Linux boxes and disk clusters in a Fibre Channel--Arbitrated Loop architecture. In ZFS, file locking and other meta-data level operations are carried out over the primary data network, after which all data are sent directly over a Fibre Channel between the workstation and the disk cluster. No intermediate server is required. Substantially higher throughputs than in traditional networked disk architectures have been demonstrated. The ZFS architecture is described and tests of the first implementation of ZFS at Fermilab are discussed. The current system is implemented for Linux and is being optimized for Fermilab's needs, but extensions to other operating systems and other data-intensive applications are clearly foreseen. |
