Storage Systems - Projects - BOSS

The Scalable Storage Systems department focuses on creating and delivering low cost (commodity) and horizontal scalable storage architecture. Our current project is Bunch of Storage Systems (BOSS).

Horizontal scaling is a common term used to describe independent servers that form a cluster that acts as a virtually centralized server to perform a common task. The horizontal scaling storage controller architecture provides methods, policies and infrastructure to create a scalable external storage controller with a mixture of different classes and independent external controllers. The resulting controller provides a single virtualized storage pool that allows a high degree of flexibility with simple storage management tasks. As more physical storage is added to the single virtualized storage pool, the architecture scales accessibility, availability and performance according to the requirements of individual storage logical units.

Our research goals include the following:

• Creating a horizontal scalable storage controller architecture to allow multiple heterogeneous external storage controllers to form a single virtualized storage pool without adding additional host-based virtualization software or hardware-based storage virtualization engine.
• Providing scalable storage performance for different logical units within one virtualized storage pool.
• Providing different levels of fault-tolerant storage protection within one virtualized storage pool.
• Providing self-managed storage policy to eliminate performance and reliability problems in a typical customer installation environment. This eliminates the requirement for an external management server to both monitor storage behavior and execute storage policies.
• Utilizing the commoditized storage hardware to form a fault-tolerant external controller.
• Providing additional values, such as more accessibility, more availability and more performance, to storage customers as they add more physical storage to the existing virtualized storage pool.
• Providing dynamic load-balancing of storage performance and utilization.
• Simplifying policy management in an entry level storage area network environment, and also providing the flexibility to allow storage management software to manage a enterprise storage environment.