Towards automating the configuration of a distributed storage system

Abstract

Versatile storage systems aim to maximize storage resource utilization by supporting the ability to 'morph' the storage system to best match the application's demands. To this end, versatile storage systems significantly extend the deployment- or run-time configurability of the storage system. This flexibility, however, introduces a new problem: a much larger, and potentially dynamic, configuration space makes manually configuring the storage system an undesirable if not unfeasible task. This paper presents our initial progress towards answering the question: "How can we configure a distributed storage system (i.e., enable/disable its various optimizations and configure their parameters) with minimal human intervention?" We discuss why manually configuring the storage system is undesirable; present the success criteria for an automated configuration solution; propose a generic architecture that supports automated configuration; and, finally, instantiate this architecture into a first prototype, which controls the configuration of similarity detection optimizations in the MosaStore distributed storage system. Our evaluation results demonstrate that the prototype can provide performance close to the optimal configuration at the cost of minimal overhead. © 2010 IEEE.