SOFTWARE: Resource Virtualization for Cluster-Based Network Storage Service

企业信息技术（IT）管理人员日益关注的一个问题是，IT基础设施不断增加的系统维护和管理成本与不断减少的硬件/软件获取成本之间的差距越来越大。这一差距正在扩大，因为系统管理和管理仍然是相对劳动密集型的，因此是不可伸缩的，尽管有广泛的研究/商业努力使该过程自动化。鉴于这一趋势，商业企业求助于IT外包，以共享昂贵而宝贵的系统管理专业知识。尽管IT外包具有引人注目的成本节约优势，但迄今为止还不是主流，主要是因为缺乏在外包方和外包方之间执行和认证所谓的服务水平协议（SLA）的技术。该提案将开发一个称为Stonehenge的多维存储虚拟化系统，该系统能够保证各种与存储相关的服务质量（QoS）指标，从而提供使能技术来强制执行与存储服务相关的sla，特别是与Internet服务相关的sla。在Stonehenge系统中开发的一组技术将使存储虚拟化领域向前迈进一大步，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。作为该项目的一个组成部分，我们还将开发一个统一的、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Internet服务转换为qos感知的服务，这样它们就能够支持以特定于服务的性能指标描述的契约性sla。除了智力贡献外，该项目还将引入一系列系统管理课程，对石溪大学CS系的本科和研究生教育产生重大影响，这些课程将以巨石阵原型为案例研究，研究生产级企业存储管理系统的功能和实现细节。

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.