SOFTWARE: Resource Virtualization for Cluster-Based Network Storage Service

公司信息技术（IT）管理人员日益关注的是，IT基础设施的系统维护和管理成本不断增加，而硬件/软件采购成本不断下降，两者之间的差距越来越大。这种差距正在扩大，因为系统管理和管理仍然是相对劳动密集型的，因此不可扩展，尽管广泛的研究/商业努力，以自动化的过程。有见及此，商业机构纷纷将资讯科技外判，以分享昂贵而宝贵的系统管理专业知识。虽然资讯科技外判具有节省成本的优势，但至今仍未成为主流，主要原因是缺乏技术去执行及核证外判双方之间的所谓服务水平协议。该提案将开发一个多维存储虚拟化系统，称为巨石阵，它能够保证各种各样的存储相关的服务质量（QoS）指标，从而提供了使能技术，以执行与存储服务相关的SLA，特别是一般的互联网服务。在巨石阵系统中开发的一组技术将使存储虚拟化领域更进一步，因为它们允许在几乎所有可能与物理磁盘相关的性能属性中虚拟化存储资源。因此，Stonehenge允许创建与物理磁盘一样有形的虚拟磁盘，但更灵活，更易于管理和维护。作为这个项目的一个组成部分，我们还将开发一个统一的和可重用的实现框架，该框架可以快速地将给定的基于集群的互联网服务转换为QoS感知的，零修改或微小修改，使得它们能够支持根据特定于服务的性能指标描述的合同SLA。该项目将通过引入一系列系统管理课程，对斯托尼布鲁克计算机科学系的本科生和研究生教育产生重大影响，这些课程将使用巨石阵原型作为关于生产级企业存储管理系统的功能和实施细节的案例研究。

A growing concern among corporate information technology (IT) managers is the elevating gap between the increasing system maintenance and administration cost of the IT infrastructure and the decreasing hardware/software acquisition cost. This gap is escalating because system administration and managementis still relatively labor-intensive and thus non-scalable, despite extensive research/commercial efforts to automate the process. In view of this trend,commercial enterprises resort to IT out-sourcing in order to share expensive and precious system management expertise. Despite its compelling cost saving advantage, IT out-sourcing so far has not been the mainstream, chiefly because the lack of technology to enforce and certify the so-called Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the out-sourcing and out-sourced parties. This proposal will develop a multi-dimensional storage virtualization system called Stonehenge, which is able to guarantee a wide variety of storage-related Quality of Service (QoS) metrics and thus provides the enabling technology toenforce SLAs associated with storage service in particular and Internet services in general. The set of techniques developed in the Stonehenge system will carry the storage virtualization field one large step further because they allow virtualization of storage resource almost in all possible performance attributes that can be associated with physical disks. As a result, Stonehenge allows creation of virtual disks that are as tangible as physical disks, and yet much more flexible and easier to manage and maintain. As an integral component of this project, we will also develop a unified and reusable implementation framework that could quickly convert, with zero or minor modification, a given cluster-based Internet service into QoS-aware, such that they are capable of supporting contractual SLAs that are described in terms of service-specific performance metrics.Besides its intellectual contributions, this project will make a major impact on the undergraduate and graduate education of the CS department at Stony Brook by introducing a series of system management courses, which will use the Stonehenge prototype as a case study on the functionality and implementation details of production-grade enterprise storage management systems.