High Performance Network Storage Solution

The ideal network storage system is globally accessible always available, provides high performance and capacity for a large number of files and requires no manual management. This paper discusses the design, implementation and performance of “virtual hard drive system (VHD)” a system that attempts to approximate this idea in practice through a novel combination of features. VHD system consists of collection of “Masters” that cooperatively manages a pool of physical disks of nodes. To a “Node” this collection appears as a highly available block level storage system that provide large abstract container called virtual disk. A virtual disk is globally accessible to all nodes on the network. We have an initial “VHD system” prototype consist of 15 800MHz systems running Windows 2000 professional and Red Hat 5.0 connected 100Mbits/s.