Design and Implementation of the Swarm Storage Server

The Swarm storage system uses log-based striping to achieve high performance. Clients collect application writes in a log and stripe the log across multiple storage servers to aggregate server bandwidth. The Swarm storage server has been designed to meet various requirements of the Swarm storage system. These include high performance for data-intensive operations, rapid crash recovery, security support and atomic interface routines. The design of the Swarm storage server is simple enough to allow its implementation as a network appliance. Department of Computer Science The University of Arizona Tucson, AZ 1 Introduction Today's network file systems suffer from performance problems that limit their scalability. File servers often become a performance bottleneck when a system has to scale beyond a few dozens of nodes. Network file systems like NFS [Sandberg85] try to deal with scalability by having multiple servers handling different parts of the directory hierarchy. This mapping of f..