Thursday, May 23, 2013

Blkreplay: Experiences with Commercial vs Open Source Storage Systems

by Thomas Schöbel-Theuer (1&1 Internet AG)

Thursday, 23.05.2013, London II, 14:30-15:00 Uhr

The blkreplay toolkit was developed by 1&1 Internet AG in order to reproduce natural loads, recorded via blktrace in our data centers. It automates large laboratory projects, e.g. benchmarking comparisons of a wide variety of storage hardware and its multi-dimensional parameter space. Some of our loads recorded by blktrace contain the real-life load patterns of thousands of customers, served in parallel.

In the talk, we report some unusual experiences with the real-life behaviour of commerical storage systems under high load. We show that OpenSource based hard- and software systems can compete with that in many areas, provided that certain conditions are met.

About the author Thomas Schöbel-Theuer:

Operating systems researcher at the University of Stuttgart, substitute professor at the University of Applied Sciences Bingen (Operating Systems + Databases), now Linux kernel expert at 1&1 Internet AG.

Linux kernel expertise: implementor of the dcache around 1995/1996. Currently working on long-distance storage replication (MARS project).