• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.134-145
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• 2004

With rapid growth in the amount of data transferred on the Internet, traditional storage systems have reached the limits of their capacity and performance. SAN (Storage Area Network), which connects hosts to disk with the Fibre Channel switches, provides one of the powerful solutions to scale the data storage and servers. In this environment, the maintenance of data consistency among hosts is an important issue because multiple hosts share the files on disks attached to the SAN. To preserve data consistency, each host can execute the disk I/O whenever disk read and write operations are requested. However, frequent disk I/O requests cause the deterioration of the overall performance of a SAN cluster. In this paper, we introduce a SANtopia global buffer manager to improve the performance of a SAN cluster reducing the number of disk I/Os. We describe the design and algorithms of the SANtopia global buffer manager, which provides a buffer cache sharing mechanism among the hosts in the SAN cluster. Micro-benchmark results to measure the performance of block I/O operations show that the global buffer manager achieves speed-up by the factor of 1.8-12.8 compared with the existing method using disk I/O operations. Also, File system micro-benchmark results show that SANtopia file system with the global buffer manager improves performance by the factor of 1.06 in case of directories and 1.14 in case of files compared with the file system without a global buffer manager.