David Pattersons seminal paper on RAID

• A Case for Redundent Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID)

I am mentoring a new starter at NetApp and so I found a couple of papers which discuss at a high level some of the problems that WAFL and RAID set out to solve. Both papers are quite old, but are interesting in that they discuss the big picture of the original problem.

A Storage Networking Appliance
This is a great paper which discusses the principles of the “filer” concept.

• NetApp Internal (Updated 2006) :

File System Design for an NFS
File Server Appliance

• File System Design for an NFS
  File Server Appliance

• Usenix : Text file (1994 Version):
• ACM Digital Library PDF (1994 Version) :

I found this repository of filesystem related documents and papers whilst looking for something behind Usenix paywall, which I don’t have access to.

http://www.fsl.cs.sunysb.edu/all-pubs.html

If titles like “Extending ACID Semantics to the File System” turn you on. This is the place for you!

A 2004 paper from Neil Gunther which essentially discusses the pitfalls of relying on observed date without applying the known performance laws (most notably little’s law) to the problem at hand.

PDF

The original link to arXiv.org (whatever that is)

This paper gives throughput and latency figures achieved using 10 GbE using Linux clients. Their tests showed a 300% improvement in latency over 1GbE. This whitepaper was published in 2003 by LANL.
Initial End-to-End Performance Evaluation of 10-Gigabit Ethernet�

Papers are available from the recent FAST (File And Storage Technologies) on their site. Rik pointed me to a particularly interesting paper on how Data Domain are able to achieve inline de-duplication.  It seems that they really are focussed on backup only, and the techniques probably wouldn’t work nearly as well for applications that do not stream data to the device.