Inter-node Communication in Peer-to-Peer Storage Clusters

Storage clusters try to transfer the idea of cluster computing into the storage domain and to scale capacity and performance by simply adding new cluster components. This paper presents analytical considerations on the scalability of storage clusters and presents a storage cluster architecture based on peer-to-peer computing that is able to scale up to hundreds of servers and clients. The resulting storage cluster environment has been successfully implemented and tested on a Linux based HPC-cluster. The measurement results presented in this paper demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of this architecture.