Wednesday, April 25, Volen 106, 10:00-11.00 am
In 1992, Network Appliance introduced its first Filer - purpose-built
NFS file server appliance running a specialized operating system,
called ONTAP, optimized for networked access and managing data on
disks. The Filer architecture incorporated many novel ideas such as
the use of NV-RAM logging for NFS operations, coalescing of small
file writes into full-stripe writes, disk-efficient data allocation
with Write-Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) and last, but not least,
versioned storage, called snapshots.
Forward to 2007 - the same underlying concepts built into the
original ONTAP are the bedrock of the Network Appliance Filers.
However, the internal architecture is very different. The current
version of ONTAP runs in a cluster of 10s of hardware nodes, capable
of completing over 1m NFS operations per second.
This talk will describe some of the concepts behind the original
ONTAP architecture. It will focus on describing the current clustered
architecture, called ONTAP GX and reflect on the challenges in
building a large-scale cluster that behaves to the outside just like
the original appliance, yet provides over petabyte of storage and
server many different clients with many different networked protocols.
Bio: Jiri Schindler is a member of research staff at the Network Appliance Advanced Development Group. His research interests include storage device-efficient data layouts, performance modeling and load balancing. He received his PhD in 2003 from Carnegie Mellon University. When not building prototypes or analytical models, he enjoys sports on water in its solid state involving sticks, helmets, poles, skis and other equipment with sharp edges.
Host: Liuba Shrira