NSM: a distributed storage architecture for data-intensive applications

Several solutions have been developed to provide data-intensive applications with the highest possible data rates. Such solutions tried to utilize the available network resources through parallel I/O and TCP/IP tuning in order to achieve a better data throughput. The focus was on achieving the highest possible data rate while other Performance enhancements factors were ignored. Furthermore, most of those solutions were point solutions and designed to work in a specific environment for a particular application. In this paper, we introduce the Network Storage Manager (NSM). NSM is a Java-based, high-performance, distributed storage system with auto reconfigurability that has been developed in the Distributed Computing Laboratory at Jackson State University. The system is designed as a framework for data-intensive distributed applications of different natures. In addition to an architecture that employs parallelism, scalability, crash recovery, and portability, NSM provides applications with full control to optimize other application-controllable features by allowing applications to fine-tune such features or even plug-in their modules and use it instead of the standard NSM implementation.