Enhancing functionality in networked storage systems.

摘要

There is an increasing demand for storage capacity and storage throughput driven largely by the growing use of the Internet and the proliferation of multimedia applications. This dissertation presents two research projects that take advantage of the increasing computation power and network connectivity in today's storage devices for enhancing functionality and performance of storage systems. One is the multiview storage system (MVSS), a flexible framework for accommodating migration of different application-specific services to storage devices. The other is SPIRAL, a client-transparent third-party transfer scheme for network attached disks. Offloading computation closer to the data source offers benefits such as more computing power at little extra cost, potential reduction in data movement through the I/O subsystem on host as well as the interconnect network, and better scalability. Both schemes are based on existing storage system architectures and block level interfaces. In contrast to existing approaches that require porting file systems onto the disks (which is difficult for devices based on a block interface, such as iSCSI), or extensive modification to the operating system (particularly the file system), these two systems require few changes to OS and applications. To illustrate both approaches, two prototype systems were built on PCs running Linux. Results from the prototype implementations demonstrated the effectiveness of MUSS and SPIRAL.