# The Design and Implementation of a Novel Open Source Massive Deployment System
## 4 Experimental Results
### Massive Deployment of Disks in a Computer  
The first experiment verifies the feasibility of the first type of massive deployment, the local connection. The massive deployment of USB flash drives on a PC was designed and conducted. A system image was deployed to a maximum of 30 flash drives by using four USB hubs on an x86-64 PC.  
The experimental environment consisted of:  
* A PC with Intel i7-3770 CPU (3.4 GHz), 32 GB DDR4 Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DRAM), and four USB 2.0, and four USB 3.0 ports
* Two groups of USB flash drives were used: The first group (Type 1) includes 30 32 GB USB 3.0 drives. The second group (Type 2) includes 30 16 GB USB 2.0 flash drives
* USB hubs: 4 Broway USB 3.0 Hubs (BW-U3038B)  
The main USB hub was plugged into the USB port of the PC. Three other USB hubs were connected to the main USB hub, as demonstrated in Figure 4.  
In the beginning, an image was taken of a template machine being installed with the Ubuntu Linux system. The size of blocks being used on the disk was 3.8 GB, and the Linux system was saved  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline
**Clonezilla Live Version** & **Year** & **Changes/Improvements** \\ \hline
1.0.0 & 2007 & Initial release of Clonezilla live. Introduced single machine backup and recovery \\
1.0.9 & 2008 & Introduced Partclone in Clonezilla live \\
1.2.11 & 2011 & Introduced massive deployment of disks in a computer \\
2.5.2 & 2017 & Introduced massive deployment in large-scale computers \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 2: Lists of the major changes to and improvements in Clonezilla live’s development.  
Figure 4: The experiment for massive deployment of USB flash drives: A USB 3.0 hub was used as the main hub; three other USB 3.0 hubs were connected to the main hub; each one of the three USB 3.0 hubs was used to connect 10 USB flash drives.  
as an image of 1.2 GB by Clonezilla live using the program pigz. The image and Clonezilla live was put on a master flash drive. The PC was booted with the 'to ram' option in Clonezilla live, which enables Clonezilla live to copy both the OS and the image file to the Random-Access Memory (RAM) when booting. This action facilitated the reading time for the OS and the image file to be minimized when conducting a massive deployment. To eliminate any read and write from the cache memory, the machine was rebooted after each deployment was finished. The command [46] that was being used to deploy the image \"my-xenial-img\" to 30 USB flash drives was as follows:  
ocs-restore-mdisks -b -p -g auto-e1 auto -e2 -nogui -batch -r -j2 -p true my-xenial-img sdf sdg sdh sdi sdj sdk sdl sdm sdn sdo sdp sdq sdr sds sdt sdu sdv sdw sdx sdy sdz sda sdab sdac sdad sdae sdaf sda sdah sdai  
Before the mass deployment of USB flash drives was started, an understanding of the writing rates for the two types of flash drives is essential. Therefore, the benchmarking program, the IOzone [47], was used to evaluate the writing rate between the two configurations, Types 1 and 2. Type 1 consists of 32 GB USB 3.0 flash drives. Type 2 consists of 16 GB USB 2.0 flash drives. The evaluation results are demonstrated in Figure 5a. According to the evaluation results, the performance of Type 1 is about two times that of the performance of Type 2. Figure 5b,c further demonstrate the performance of writing an image to various numbers of USB flash drives 1, 2,..., 30 USB flash drives, respectively. While the number of USB flash drive(s) is small, e.g., 1, 2,..., 10, the deploy time to Type 2 USB flash drive(s) is about two times the deploy time to a single Type 1 USB flash drive (refer to Figure 5b,c). However, the discrepancies between the deploy time to both Types 1 and 2 USB flash drives approaches zero when the number of USB flash drives approaches 30. All of the USB flash drives being deployed have been verified as bootable and can successfully enter the Ubuntu Linux on the test machines. Therefore, the feasibility for the massive deployment of disks in a single computer by the proposed architecture has also been verified.