Understanding Storage Architectures

This assignment delves into the fundamental concepts of storage architectures. It covers different types of storage such as block, file, and object storage, explaining their characteristics and use cases. The assignment also discusses unified storage, which provides a single platform for accessing various storage types. Understanding these concepts is crucial in modern computing environments where efficient and reliable data management is paramount.

Running head: CLOUD COMPUTING (STORAGE)
Cloud Computing (Storage)
Name of the student
Name of the University
Author’s Note

1CLOUD COMPUTING (STORAGE)
Workbook for Week 7 (Storage)
Part A (3 Marks)
Exercise 1: Storage Methods (1 mark)
1. The process of Memory virtualization worked with Virtual Machine, Process and
Memory Address (García-Valls, Cucinotta & Lu, 2014). When multiple Virtual Memory (VM) is
connected in series and a process (P) is taking place in each VM then the mapping is done in the
memory inside one-page table for cache mechanism to get easy access in the Memory Address
(MA). The two components to run this addresses are Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) and
Memory Management Unit (MMU) that can optimize all the performance that are in the virtual
memory (Gandhi et al., 2014). Mapping of actual memory with the Guest machine memory is
done by the mechanism called shadow paging, which comes from the Database Management
System (DBMS). This whole mechanism of Memory Virtualization works internally with
hexadecimal codes, which is managed by the Operating System.
2. RAID means (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), RAID 0 is for the configuration
used striping for data handling (Fekete & Varki 2016). It increases the performance of the
systems. In RAID 0 all the data files are first broken into smaller blocks each and written to a
separate disk drive to increase the I/O performance with little to no fault tolerance.
3. The term mirroring, parity and striping are the storage techniques of RAID:
Stripping is a process in which data files in a RAID are broken down into smaller block
size each and written to a different physical disk drive.
Mirroring is a technique to store the data of identical copies on the RAID simultaneously.
This affects fault tolerance and the performance.

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Parity is a technique where striping and the checksum method is used for the data blocks
to calculate the parity function.
Exercise 2: Storage Design (2 marks)
4. Storage Repository Design, the other name known is LUN (Logical Unit Number) in the
industry of IT (Ume, 2015). Storage Repository Design has developed their importance for
snapshot design, usage of the disk and for the cache and the performance of the usage of disk.
SAN allocates cache to each individual repository containing the write cache. In a snapshot,
create a storage repository, which is a delta file, of exactly the same size of the Virtual Disk
within the storage repository and allow quick easy rollback. One disadvantage is, if the Virtual
disk is lost, then the snapshot cannot be rolled back as delta disk. Underlying the performance
can only be achieved in the matter of physical disk is
5. The Internet Storage System (ISS) referred as the RAID arrays that arise feature-rich for
the storage arrays and are capable of providing highly optimized I/O processing (Aderholdt et al.,
2015).
6. The four important components of ISS are:
a) Front End: The Front End interfaces the host and a Computer System or the Storage
System. The Front End has mainly two components-
i) Front End Port: Front End Ports help to connect the host to the intelligence storage
system.
ii) Front End Controllers: Front End Controllers control the data coming from the
internal Data bus.
b) Cache is a semiconductor.
c) Back End interfaces the Physical disks and the Cache Memory. It has two components:-

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i) Back End Ports: The Back End ports controls the transference of the data between the
physical disks and the Cache memory
ii) Back End Controllers: Back End controller will communicate with the particular
disks to Read/Write the operation to provide some limited data storage temporarily.
d) Physical Disks: In the Physical Disks all the data is store and are then connected with the
back end with the help of Fiber Channel Interface.
7. Cache main purpose is to reduce the time for the I/O service to request the host (Bender,
2016). The host is isolated from only the mechanical delay, which is connected to the hard disk
drive or to the rotating disk so that the performance of the Storage System can be improves by
Cache. For ISS, the rotating disk is the slowest component.
8.
Figure 1: A diagram for SAN vs NAS
Source: Author

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SAN is a block I/O disk directly connected to the server. NAS is a remote I/O file, which
is redirected from a network to a device.
9. SAN advantages over NAS are as follows (Patil, 2016):
 SAN is faster, scalable and simple to use than NAS system.
 NAS runs devices on a built-in OS, whereas SAN uses Fiber Channel to connect via
storage devices and make it capable of sharing data of low level among themselves.
10. The two known NAS file sharing protocols are (Maciel, 2014):
1. NFS – Network File System Protocol, which is define as a protocol to share a file of the
Traditional UNIX environment.
2. CIFS – The Protocol of Common Internet File System, which depends on the Server
Message Block Protocol for Traditional Microsoft environment file sharing protocol.

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Part B (3 Marks)
Exercise 3: Storage Design (1 Mark)
11. Solution:
Time required for I/O depends on disk service time
Therefore, Disk service time = Average seek time + data transfer time + rotational
latency
Given, Average seek time = 5 millisecond
Rotational latency = ½ time taken for the full rotation.
Since, rotational speed = 15000 rpm
1 revolution = 1/ (15000/60) sec.
Therefore, For ½ revolution time taken = 0.5/ (15000/60) = 2ms.
Data transfer rate = 40 MB/s
Therefore, 4 KB I/O transfer takes, 4 KB/40MB/s= 0.1 ms
Therefore, Time required for 1 I/O to perform = 5 ms + 2ms + 0.1ms= 7.1 msec
Now, a disk can perform maximum number of IOPS = 1/7.1 ms = 140 IOPS
Therefore, the maximum number of IOPS a disk perform at 70 % utilization = 140 * 0.7 = 98
IOPS

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Now, to meet the disks number,
The performance of Application’s required = 4900/98 = 50 disks
The capacity of the Application’s required = 1 TB/100 GB = 10 disks
Finally, the disk that is required = Maximum (Capacity, Performance)
= Maximum (10, 50) = 50 disks
Exercise 4: Storage Evolution (2 Marks)
12. Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) provides simplicity, scalability to the Ethernet with
lossless nature, functionality, manageability and offers huge savings in reducing the number of
an adapter and the switches. It allows the user to leverage with the existing investment in
Information Technology, lowers the cost and improves the performance.
13. FCoE replaces the NIC and the HBA in the server and then uses connections of 10 GB to
provide losslessness to the FCoE switch.

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14. Virtual Storage Area Network (SAN) defines the configuration system, which will be
easily scaled out easily without changing the physical layout.
15. The protocols of IP SAN are those protocols having the storage devices with multiple
servers of which has been shared block that can access pools by using storage protocol, which
depends only on the Internet Protocol (IP) suite (González-Férez & Bilas, 2014). Fibre Channel
over IP is a storage networking technology that is completely based on the Internet Protocol (IP),
and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has developed it (Black & Koning, 2014) that
enables all the transmission that are done for the Fibre Channel (FC) for tunneling the data
between the SAN over the IP network.
16. What is an advantage of a flat address space over a hierarchical address space?
a. Highly scalable with minimal impact on performance
b. Provides access to data, based on retention policies
c. Provides access to block, file, and object with the same interface
d. Consumes less bandwidth on network while accessing data
Answer: a. Highly scalable with minimal impact on performance
17. What is a role of metadata service in an OSD node?
a. Responsible for storing data in the form of objects
b. Stores unique IDs generated for objects
c. Stores both objects and objects IDs
d. Controls functioning of storage devices
Answer: b. Stores unique Ids generated for objects

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18. What is used to generate an object ID in a CAS system?
a. File metadata
b. Source and destination address
c. Binary representation of data
d. File system type and ownership
Answer: c: Binary representation of data
19. What accurately describes block I/O access in a unified storage?
a. I/O traverse NAS head and storage controller to disk
b. I/O traverse OSD node and storage controller to disk
c. I/O traverse storage controller to disk
d. I/O is directly sent to the disk
Answer: c: I/O traverse storage controller to disk
20. What accurately describes unified storage?
a. Provides block, file, and object-based access within one platform
b. Provides block and file storage access using objects
c. Supports block and file access using flat address space
d. Specialized storage device purposely built in archiving
Answer: a: Provides block, file and object-based access within one platform

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Reference
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Sorrillo, L. (2015). Secure Storage Architectures (No. ORNL/TM-2015/212). Oak Ridge
National Laboratory (ORNL).
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