Building a Distributed Block Storage System for Cloud Infrastructure

The development of cloud infrastructures has stimulated interest in virtualized block storage systems, exemplified by Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), Eucalyptus’ EBS implementation, and the Virtual Block Store (VBS) system. Compared with other solutions, VBS is designed for flexibility, and can be extended to support various Virtual Machine Managers and Cloud platforms. However, due to its single-volume-server architecture, VBS has the problem of single point of failure and low scalability. This paper presents our latest improvements to VBS for solving these problems, including a new distributed architecture based on the Lustre file system, new workflows, better reliability and scalability, and read-only volume sharing. We call this improved implementation VBS-Lustre. Preliminary tests show that VBS-Lustre can provide both better throughput and higher scalability in multiple attachment scenarios than VBS. VBS-Lustre could potentially be applied to solve some challenges for current cluster file systems, such as metadata management and small file access.