A case for network-centric buffer cache organization

The emergence of clustered and networked storage architecture gives rise to a new type of servers which act as data conduits over the network for remotely stored data. These servers, which we call pass-through servers, are mainly responsible for passing the data through them without interpreting it in any way. In this paper, we put forward a scheme of network-centric buffer cache management. This scheme can facilitate the data transmission through passthrough servers by avoiding redundant data copying, and by caching the data in a network-ready form, while having no modifications to the existing buffer cache organization. The performance measurement on a NFS server using iSCSI storage running on Linux with this scheme shows throughput improvement of more than 50% compared to a NFS server on common Linux, while consuming about 40% less of CPU resource.