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Almaden Institute
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Self-Managing
Storage: Taming Storage Administration Costs Throughout the Storage
Lifecycle
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Abstract:
Managing storage systems throughout their lifecycle is a costly business;
many studies have shown the administration costs to be multiples of the
initial capital outlay. Many of the tasks that human experts have traditionally
undertaken (such as system design, configuration, monitoring, data placement
and migration decisions) use time-consuming processes of trial and error,
guided by simple rules of thumb. Due to the complexity of these tasks and
lack of workload information, the resulting systems often cost significantly
more than necessary, or fail to perform adequately. Our solution to this
problem is to automate the design and configuration process using a tool
we call Hippodrome. It can explore the design space more thoroughly than
humans, and implement the design automatically, thereby eliminating many
tedious, error-prone operations. Hippodrome is structured as an iterative
loop: it analyzes a workload to determine its requirements, creates a new
storage system design to better meet these requirements, migrates the existing
system to the new design. It repeats the loop until it finds a storage system
design that satisfies the workload’s I/O requirements. This presentation
describes the Hippodrome loop and demonstrates that our prototype implementation
converges rapidly to appropriate system designs.
Simon
Towers is the manager of HP’s Storage Systems research at Hewlett-Packard
Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA. Simon joined HP in 1988 as a researcher
at their European Research labs in UK. There he became Project Manager
and eventually Department Manager for HP’s research in Network and Systems
Management. In 1997 he joined Microsoft in Seattle to lead the development
of Windows 2000 systems instrumentation and management. Simon returned
to HP in June 2000 to head their Storage Systems research.
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