SonD : A fast service deployment system based on IP SAN

Deploying operating systems and services in an enterprise environment can be a time-consuming and cumbersome task. With the dramatic increase of the number of computers managed by the system administrator, the work of management is more complicated than before. Moreover, services provided by servers in data center change frequently, which requires a flexible service deployment system to achieve on demand deployment. To maximize return on investment (ROI) and stay competitive in today's fast-paced global economy, administrators must be able to deploy systems or services quickly and effectively with minimal downtime. This paper presents SonD, a system for providing dynamic, flexible, and quick service and operating system deployment in a LAN environment. The techniques used by SonD include an iterative snapshot mechanism based on an IP SAN system, which provides writable snapshots to achieve fast creation of the service, a dynamic service mapping method, and a network boot technology achieved by both software and hardware solutions. This design results in a system which can rapidly, flexibly, dynamically and reliably distribute OSes and services to many clients simultaneously. For example, SonD can deploy 50 windows XP systems in a few minutes on commodity PCs. We describe SonD's design and implementation, and review the key technologies for our system. We evaluate its performance and apply it to oil exploration. The results show that SonD fits well with the service deployment usage in cluster computing environment.