File and directory services

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

As the number of computers involved in every facet of daily life continues to grow rapidly, the problems in the area traditionally known as distributed systems become increasingly important.  In particular problems such as harmonizing the configurations of many machines, reliably storing important data, ensuring the consistency of that data, and replacing and updating the physical machines as they age take up an increasing amount of effort.  My research into file and directory systems for distributed systems addresses these concerns by inventing and refining techniques for storing and synchronizing vast quantities of data. An old technique called virtualization has recently been rediscovered and is being widely used to help manage and secure the increasingly large number of computers in use.  Virtualization affects the functionality required in computer storage systems as well as the demands placed on these storage systems, and so I am also looking at storage systems that are designed and optimized for virtualized environments.  In these environments the ability to quickly create copies of a file system that can share storage resources with other concurrently written copies is very important but is not supported by current technologies.  I will be looking at system structures that can provide this support very efficiently.