A Low Cost, Highly Reliable Virtual Network Storage System

Virtual network based storage is considered a critical part of any virtual data center implementation. Virtual data centers combine virtual networks, virtual storage and virtual servers and applications into malleable, special purpose data center configurations. The high cost of virtual network storage has slowed the integration of such systems into small and midsized data center environments. Furthermore, virtual network storage systems require high reliability as they provide a critical, centralized resource that is depended upon by many of the data center servers. In this paper, an iSCSI virtual network storage system is prototyped in two implementations; one uses the no cost open source Fedora Linux implementation whereas a second implementation uses the Windows 2003 Server as the base operating system. Both systems are built on a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) system that provides high reliability in the case of disk failures. The implementations are performance tested using two industry standard benchmark tools, to determine their usefulness as low-cost, highly reliable components of a virtual data center. It is concluded that such systems do provide effective virtual storage solutions, and are particularly suitable for virtual data center implementations.