NAS File System: Panacea for extreme performance at High Bandwidth to High IOPS Workloads

The Network Attached Storage systems have traditionally taken a call to either excelling at handling high IOPS workloads with scaled up systems or win at the high throughput game with scaled out distributed systems. The high IOPS flow may need to deal with lots of metadata operations with small random reads and writes. The high throughput flows usually deal with lots of large sequential reads and writes and far fewer metadata operations. The big names in each field have tried to make a less than successful attempt at making a dent into the other type of market. So, when we set out to build the next generation stack to make a foray into NAS, we wanted the architecture to not only fit well into both the high IOPS and high throughput workloads but also excel at them. This talk will review our recent work and experiences as we shaped our architecture to build this next generation NAS, that could be our panacea to solve the extreme needs, with one architecture.