SBIR Phase I: Scalable and Reliable Storage Infrastructure for Web Server Farms

Data Reliability Inc., Jackson MS

Investigators

Abstract

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to study the feasibility of building a scalable and reliable storage system for Web server farms. This system is called WebTank. WebTank is a revolutionary system that employs a combination of unique ideas to address the main challenges encountered in Web server farm environments, namely: scalability, availability, and manageability. With the rapid growth of the Internet and data driven Web services, traditional storage solutions are not able to keep pace with the rapidly expanding storage requirements of Web server farms. This solution allows for independent and practically unlimited scalability of capacity, file access performance, and namespace access performance. It will offer the opportunity of applying a more effective block-level edge caching technique, which enhances the performance and achieves better utilization of the valuable cache memory. WebTank utilizes a unique, very fast coding technique called PND to ensure fast, reliable, and highly available access to data. Many applications will exploit the competitive advantages of the proposed solution including multimedia Web-based services, content management, document storage and delivery, digital imaging, file transfer services, and video on demand. These ideas can also be expanded to build general-purpose file servers that are not subject to performance bottlenecks and capacity limitations. Therefore having an important impact on building next generation NAS devices.