Design of an Intelligent Object-based Storage device

Intelligent storage systems were an active area of research in later half of last decade. The idea was to improve the throughput of data intensive applications from database and image processing domains by offloading computation onto the active storage elements and hopefully reducing unnecessary data traffic between data sources and compute nodes. With the advent of Object-based Storage Devices (OSD) we feel that the time is appropriate to have a relook at notion of intelligent storage. OSDs provide a higher level object abstraction that makes it easier to describe the computation to the devices. OSDs provide the right platform to ask several questions in the context of intelligent storage devices. This is a working document capturing our experience in desiging an intelligent OSD (iOSD) and using it to build scalable systems. In this preliminary document we describe the design goals for an intelligent OSD. We explain the implementation details of iOSD and challenges faced in integrating the offload engine into OSD ecosystem. We describe how offloaded computation is expressed, executed and managed in an storage system made up of iOSDs. Finally we quantify the performance and overhead of iOSD.