ECSim: A Simulation Tool for Performance Evaluation of Erasure Coded Storage Systems

Simulation environments provide a comprehensive set of advantages to users, like cost effectiveness and capability to understand the shortcomings of the system under design, without physical implementation. Simulation platforms help the industry and academia, to document and publish their research outputs in a timely and cost efficient manner. The ECSim tool presented here, is meant for academic use in the initial stages of research. The platform provides an environment where the performance of erasure coded storage systems can be tested without much effort. The main highlight of the simulator is that it provides a very simple environment which can run on a standalone system. The environment does not require the user to be a programmer, since it provides an interactive command line interface to the user. The ability to simulate data center, clusters, master nodes, storage nodes with computing power, storage devices, bandwidth usage and disk I/O involved are notable features of ECSim.