The Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster - Delivering Scalable High Bandwidth Storage

Fundamental advances in high-level storage architectures and low-level storage-device interfaces greatly improve the performance and scalability of storage systems. Specifically, the decoupling of storage control (i.e., file system policy) from datapath operations (i.e., read, write) allows client applications to leverage the readily available bandwidth of storage devices while continuing to rely on the rich semantics of today’s file systems. Further, the evolution of storage interfaces from block-based devices with no protection to object-based devices with per-command access control enables storage to become secure, first-class IP-based network citizens. This paper examines how the Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster leverages distributed storage and object-based devices to achieve linear scalability of storage bandwidth. Specifically, we focus on implementation issues with our Object-based Storage Device, aggregation algorithms across the collection of OSDs, and the close coupling of networking and storage to achieve scalability.