Volume 9 - Issue 3
Implementation of a Software-Defined Storage Service with Heterogeneous Storage Technologies
- Chao-Tung Yang
Department of Computer Science, Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan R.O.C.
ctyang@thu.edu.tw
- Shuo-Tsung Chen
College of Engineering, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Taiwan R.O.C.
- Wei-Hsiang Lien
Department of Computer Science, Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan R.O.C.
- Vinod Kumar Verma
Department of Computer Science and Engineering Deemed University under Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India Longowal, Sangrur District, India
Keywords: cloud service, virtualization, software-defined storage
Abstract
With the popularity of cloud computing, the demand for cloud infrastructure also increases. Because
the requirement of cloud computing increases steeply, the infrastructure of cloud service expands too.
Spending the least cost to achieve the best effect on the cloud is a big problem for every researcher,
and virtualization is one of the answers to resolve this problem. Virtualization is a technology that
divides the real resources into logically manageable resources, which are then provided to the users
to control and manage them efficiently and legitimately. Software-Defined Storage (SDS) is a kind
of virtualization which integrates the storage resources and different storage devices by software to
increase the usability and activity. According to user requirements, SDS can be adjusted to achieve
the optimal performance. In recent years, SDS becomes more and more popular, and several companies
have announced their product. However, the generic standard still has not appeared; most
products are only appropriate for their devices, and SDS can integrate a few storages. In this paper,
the OpenStack is adopted to build and manage the cloud service, and software is used to integrate
storage resources including Hadoop HDFS, Ceph, and Swift on OpenStack to achieve the concept
of SDS. In such software platform, different storage devices are harmonized to provide an integrated
storage array and build a virtual storage pool; so that users do not feel restrained by the storage devices.
The software platform also provides a web interface for managers to arrange the storage space,
administrate users, and configure security settings. For allocation of the storage resources, we make
a policy and assign the specific storage array to the machine that acquires the resources according
to that policy. Then, the performance tests for file systems are conducted to prove the system runs
correctly. From the experimental results, it is shown the performance of Hadoop HDFS is better than
the other two storages; i.e., except a few instances, Hadoop HDFS outperforms the other two storages
in the same environment.