Monitoring of a Grid Storage Virtualization Service

Abstract

Grid computing is commonly used for large scale application requiring huge computation capabilities. In such distributed architectures, the data storage on the distributed storage resources must be handled by a dedicated storage system to ensure the required quality of service. In order to simplify the data placement on nodes and to increase the performance of applications, a storage virtualization layer can be used. This layer can be a single parallel filesystem (like GPFS) or a more complex middleware. The latter is preferred as it allows the data placement on the nodes to be tuned to increase both the reliability and the performance of data access. Thus, in such a middleware, a dedicated monitoring system must be used to ensure optimal performance. In this paper, the authors briefly introduce the Visage middleware – a middleware for storage virtualization. They present the most broadly used grid monitoring systems, and explain why they are not adequate for virtualized storage monitoring. The authors then present the architecture of their monitoring system dedicated to storage virtualization. We introduce the workload prediction model used to define the best node for data placement, and show on a simple experiment its accuracy.