Lone Star Stack: Architecture of a Disk-Based Archival System

2014

The need for huge storage systems rises with the ever growing creation of data. With growing capacities and shrinking prices, "write once read sometimes" workloads become more common. New data is constantly added, rarely updated or deleted, and every stored byte might be read at any time - a common pattern for digital archives or big data scenarios. We present the Lone Star Stack, a disk based archival storage system building block that is optimized for high reliability and energy efficiency. It provides a POSIX file system interface that uses flash based storage for write-offloading and metadata and the disk-based Lone Star RAID for user data storage. The RAID attempts to spin down disks a…