CAREER: Active Block Layer Extensions: A Foundation for Building Self-Managing Storage Systems

存储系统的复杂性和规模都在迅速增加。研究人员和从业人员普遍认为，自我管理是其发展的关键下一步。自我管理存储系统将自动适应操作环境和应用程序工作负载特征的变化，以满足管理员指定的系统目标。然而，由于编程环境本身的复杂性（操作系统）以及自我管理扩展的行为、正确性和交互属性的理解不足，这样的系统非常难以正确地构建和部署。因此，可靠的自我管理扩展的创新步伐远远不足以满足当前的需求。活动块层扩展（ABLE）项目开发了一个核心块层原语库，一个分析个人和集体服务行为的推理引擎，以及附带的推理，测试和配置工具。ABLE项目还开发了针对电源管理、性能、可扩展性和安全性的自我管理解决方案，这些解决方案可作为开发示例，并有助于完善软件基础设施。该项目将产生一个操作系统基础设施API和几个自我管理扩展作为软件工件。这将通过减少开发人员错误、加快开发周期以及向管理员提供推理和配置工具来简化和标准化块层服务开发和部署，从而帮助实现稳健的部署。ABLE项目还将为少数民族院校佛罗里达国际大学的学生提供前沿研究经验。所有ABLE软件都将是开放源码的，并通过项目网站提供。

Storage systems are rapidly increasing in both complexity and size. There is a general consensus among both researchers and practitioners that self-management is a critical next step in their evolution. Self-managing storage systems will automatically adapt to changes in the operational environment and the application workload characteristics, to meet administrator-specified system goals. However, such systems are extremely hard to build and deploy correctly due to the complexities of the programming environment itself - the operating system, as well as the poorly understood behavioral, correctness, and interaction properties of self-management extensions. As a consequence, the pace of innovation of reliable, self-management extensions is far from adequate to meet current needs. The Active Block Layer Extensions (ABLE) project develops a library of core block layer primitives, a reasoning engine that analyzes individual and collective service behavior, and accompanying reasoning, testing, and configuration tools. The ABLE project also develops self-management solutions targeting power management, performance, scalability, and security, that serve as development examples and help refine the software infrastructure. The project will produce an OS infrastructure API and several self-management extensions as software artifacts. These will simplify and standardize block layer service development and deployment by reducing developer error, accelerating the development cycle, and providing reasoning and configuration tools to the administrator that aid robust deployment. The ABLE project will also provide cutting-edge research experience to students at Florida International University, a minority institution. All ABLE software will be open-source and made available through the project web-site.