Real-time access to storage is needed by many applications, such as broadcast, multicast and editing of digital media files, and sensor data collection and processing. Many ways of providing real-time data access have been proposed and implemented including Guaranteed Rate I/O (GRIO) disk bandwidth scheduler, available from Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) of Mountain View, Calif. In conjunction with the XLV disk volume manager, also available from SGI, guaranteed disk bandwidth reservations are provided by GRID at the local client level. Bandwidth reservations can be attached to individual files or entire file systems and can be shared between processes. The local storage has to be configured appropriately to support GRIO. If the amount of data required by an application is greater than can be provided by a single disk, the disk must be in a volume with the data striped across several disks or staggered to multiple disks so that different processes can access different disks independently.
GRIO is an integral part of the I/O system in IRIXO (SGI's version of UNIX) to ensure that real-time access can be guaranteed. GRIO uses a frame-based disk block scheduler without reordering requests and maintains a database of the different pieces of hardware in the system and their bandwidth characteristics. When a bandwidth reservation is received from a process executing on the local client node, determinations of available bandwidth are made for components along the entire physical I/O path, starting with the I/O adapter accessed by multiple processors and ending with the local data storage. The total reservations for all processes at each component along the path is kept below the total available bandwidth for that component. If this level would be exceeded, the GRID daemon denies admission to the request. Excess capacity may be used for overband consumption by a process provided the remaining reservations will not be adversely affected during the period of the overband request.
Although GRIO is available for individual client nodes, no known client software solutions provide guaranteed real-time access to data storage shared by a cluster of nodes via a storage area network (SAN). The closest known solution is to copy files stored on a SAN to local storage and use GRID to control synchronization of accesses to the files in local storage. This technique is adequate for some uses, such as non-linear editing; but is less than desirable for large-scale on-demand multicasting of video files, for example, due to the large amount of extra local storage that would be required and would not be needed if real-time access to the resources of the SAN could be guaranteed.
There are several benefits of SANs that are not obtained by the solution described above. Fault tolerance for accesses to the data is one of the primary benefits of a SAN. In addition, load balancing and enabling heterogeneous client access to the same physical storage are also benefits that can be obtained by a clustered file system using a SAN.
Other ways of obtaining some of these benefits include modifying disk controller firmware to schedule and reorder data requests and using intelligent disk networks as proposed by Nagle in “Active Storage Nets”, DARPA/ITO Active Nets Meeting July 1998. Nagle proposed a network of intelligent disk drives that can rearrange their striping configuration as needed to meet quality of service guarantees. This requires adding intelligence to the disk drives and providing an actively reconfigurable network linking the intelligent disk drives. A simpler solution requiring fewer modifications to a cluster file system that provides access to a SAN is preferable from a cost-benefit perspective.