Support for automatic diagnosis and dynamic configuration of scalable storage systems

Abstract

Distributed storage systems are expected to serve a broad spectrum of applications, satisfying various requirements with respect to capacity, speed, reliability, security at low cost. Virtualization techniques allow flexible configuration of storage systems in order to meet resource constraints and application requirements. Violin provides block level virtualization that enables the extension of storage with new mechanisms and combining them to create modular hierarchies. Creating and maintaining such virtualization hierarchies however, is a complex task where a human system administrator is the most expensive and less efficient element. We introduced Conductor, an automated support system that tries to grasp human expertise with declarative rules that are applied to storage management. So far the initial, static configuration capabilities of Conductor have been elaborated. Static features however, are not sufficient for practical purposes as the storage system evolves, i.e. requirements, workloads, access patterns may change in time. This paper presents work in progress that is aimed at extending Conductor with supporting dynamic features. We introduce the concepts of global and directed reconfigurations and discuss their potential strengths and weaknesses. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.