LARGE SCALE SERVERS: WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

• network-based storage servers suffer from storage and network I/O bottleneck
• storage I/O bottleneck
• results from the performance gap between the storage and processor-memory systems
• network I/O bottleneck
• phenomenon that restricts the throughput at the application level to a small fraction of the network bandwidth
• results from lack of integration of OS, network protocols and architecture
• several ideas proposed to deal with it
 
• finally, most servers are bus-based. But since bus-based interconnects do not scale well, large scale systems cannot be built easily.