A Key Technology Of FPGA-based Cloud Storage Architecture

Cloud storage is a new concept in recent years and a new solution which extended from the concept of cloud computing. It refers to a system which can make different kinds of storage devices distributed in different locations with the clustering technology, distributed system technology and grid technology work synergetically through the management of related software. From outside, these storage devices can provide the functions of business access and data storage by working together. If a cloud computing system has plenty of cloud storage devices, and its tasks focus on mass data storage, data access and data management, the cloud computing system will be transformed into a cloud storage system. Cloud storage is a new solution which can store users’data into the cloud, and they can freely access to the cloud after connecting to the cloud through any networked devices.There are some common cloud storage services at present:Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), Nutanix’s storage service, Sohu company netdisk, Baidu cloud disk and so on, but they do not provide the cloud services which small development boards require. The system achieved the cloud storage architecture based on FPGA on the basis of TCP/IP, through integrating distributed storage and adding our custom data communication protocols, which can not only make FPGA development board achieve the function of cloud storage, but also lay a solid foundation for the cloud computing based on FPGA.This system achieved the safe, stable and reliable cloud storage for data through the process of target data’uniform mapreduce and the simulation of many FPGA development boards to a large number of storage devices this system using the cluster technology and distributed idea. This system can well accomplish desired functions on the FPGA hardware cluster because of the parallelism and dynamic reconfigurable of FPGA.In the process of the implementation and design of this system, we used Quartus Ⅱ, Eclipse as the integrated development environment, and use the Ethereal software to carry on network capture verification, and the switch to complete various experiments in the process of system development. Coding languages included:verilog, Java, HTML5, JS etc. We chose Altera’s DE2development board, PC, router and so on as our ultimate test platform and adopted an interactive software (i.e. a website, provide the user with an interface). After testing and verifying, we proved the system could steady run on the DE2development board with50MHz clock.This article completed detailed analysis and evaluation of the system from the aspects of data transmission rate, accuracy of data storage, data storage stability and so on. The results showed that this system could correctly complete the function of the cloud storage, and had significant performance advantages of low power consumption, high integration and good stability as FPGA’s peculiar features, and it is also an important foundation for the development of cloud computing based on FPGA. Therefore, the cloud storage based on FPGA has excellent theory value and practical significance.