Obtaining High Performance for Storage Outsourcing

The viability of storage outsourcing is critically dependent on the performance of remote storage. In this paper, we measure the performance of I/O benchmarks accessing a remote block-level storage system. We use benchmarks that represent a variety of workloads, running on several operating systems and file systems. We conclude that remote storage is already viable for a wide variety of active workloads, and we point out areas where new techniques could provide significant additional performance enhancement.