GPFS-SNC: An enterprise storage framework for virtual-machine clouds

In a typical cloud computing environment, the users are provided with storage and compute capacity in the form of virtual machines. The underlying infrastructure for these services typically comprises large distributed clusters of commodity machines and direct-attached storage in concert with a server virtualization layer. The focus of this paper is on an enterprise storage framework that supports the timely and resource-efficient deployment of virtual machines in such a cloud environment. The proposed framework makes use of innovations in the General Parallel File System-Shared Nothing Clusters (GPFS (R)-SNC) file system, supports optimal allocation of resources to virtual machines in a hypervisor-agnostic fashion, achieves low latency when provisioning for new virtual machines, and adapts to the input-output needs of each virtual-machine instance in order to achieve high performance for all types of applications.