Performance evaluation of storage systems based on network-attached disks

The emergence of network-attached disks provides the possibility of transferring data between the storage system and the client directly. This offers new possibilities in building a distributed storage system. In this paper, we examine different storage organizations based on network-attached disks and compare the performance of these systems to a traditional system. Trace-driven simulations are used to measure the average response times of the client requests in two different workloads. We show that the advantages of distributing the server´s network processing load to disks can be offset by losses in cache hits in a system based on network-attached disks. The two workloads we considered highlight this impact. We show that it is possible to offload significant load from the server by utilizing network-attached disks and point out that specific applications may be able to better exploit the features of network-attached disks.