SDStorage: A Software Defined Storage Experimental Framework

With the rapid growth of data centers and the unprecedented increase in storage demands, the traditional storage control techniques are considered unsuitable to deal with this large volume of data in an efficient manner. The Software Defined Storage (SDStore) comes as a solution for this issue by abstracting the storage control operations from the storage devices and set it inside a centralized controller in the software layer. Building a real SDStore system without any simulation and emulation is considered an expensive solution and may have a lot of risks. Thus, there is a need to simulate such systems before the real-life implementation and deployment. In this paper we present SDStorage, an experimental framework to provide a novel virtualized testbed environment for SDStore systems. The main idea of SDStorage is based on the Mininet Software Defined Network (SDN) OpenFlow simulator and is built over of it. The main components of Mininet, which are the host, the switch and the controller, are customized to serve the needs of SDStore simulation environments.