Scalable and Reliable Storage Virtualization
Two emerging technologies, virtualized and cloud storage, are transforming the storage infrastructure of computing systems. Both technologies enable increased resource sharing, promising more flexible, manageable, and cost-efficient use of storage resources. However, these shared storage technologies raise several challenges for storage providers. Storage systems must meet the competing and conflicting performance demands of customers. They must be designed for heterogeneous storage units with widely-varying characteristics, such as low-end and enterprise disks, and a variety of flash devices. Storage reliability and security become critical concerns because loss of data availability or data compromise can affect a large number of users, potentially damaging customers’ businesses. These and other requirements, such as reducing energy consumption, result in growing complexity of shared storage systems, with significant time and effort being spent designing, customizing, and maintaining storage solutions, both at the provider and customer ends.
Our key observation is that a policy-based architecture that allows flexible specification and enforcement of storage requirements is essential for managing the complexity of shared storage systems. We propose a storage architecture in which high-level policies allow expressing application-level requirements using a common management interface, and the system enforces these requirements by monitoring both storage requests and the dynamic characteristics of storage devices. Our policy-based storage system will adapt to changes in workload, hardware configurations, power consumption and load hot-spots, while providing reliable and secure storage to clients. It will help reduce storage provider costs, while enabling greater flexibility for their customers, thereby increasing the use of virtualization and cloud storage technologies.
