Abstract
This work presents a new emulation framework for object-based storage devices (OSDs). The virtual storage emulation framework integrates an object-based storage emulator with a virtual machine. The OSD model in this work not only provides a respectable balance between the emulation speed and accuracy, but also avoids the common problems with conventional storage emulation frameworks. It resolves the limitations of host CPU resource consumption and network communication overhead found in other frameworks. The storage emulator in the virtual machine runs independently of the emulated CPU, and no network messages are required for communication. The OSD model is implemented as a SCSI target in QEMU. It implements asynchronous I/O request processing to improve its throughput. Operating systems can be run inside QEMU to provide a realistic workload and a more in-depth analysis of the system.The OSD model is compared to a traditional file system on top of a block device. The offloading of storage management into the device dramatically increases the throughput of the storage system. The benchmark results demonstrate an I/O performance improvement of 436% in the best case. Synthetic database workload performance improves by 666% in the best case. The results suggest that the object-based storage architecture is an ideal choice for throughput machines, especially under heavy workloads.