| Faculty name: | Angela Demke Brown |
|---|---|
| Research area: | computer systems, operating systems, compiler design |
| Campus address: | BA5228 |
| Campus phone: | 416-946-8080 |
| Email address: |
demke [at] cs.toronto.edu
|
| Number of students: | 1 |
| Skills required: |
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Storage virtualization is increasingly being used to solve some of the most significant challenges faced by large-scale storage systems, such as failure management, data migration and storage administration. Storage virtualization refers to the process of abstracting logical storage from physical storage, i.e., the user is presented with a logical view of the storage system while the virtualization system maps this storage to an actual physical location. This abstraction allows multiple disk arrays, scattered over the network, to be viewed as a single monolithic storage device, that supports fault tolerance and uniform management.
Unfortunately, virtualization solutions do not take advantage of information available to higher-level storage software, such as file systems. For example, file system meta-data is more important that regular data and could be replicated for improved reliability. Similarly, data from the same file could be stripped across multiple disks to improve performance.
We are working on a project that makes the virtualization system aware of some information available to the file-system, allowing it to make informed decisions that improve reliability or performance of the storage system.
In this project, the summer student will be help design and implement various components that improve the flexibility of the storage virtualization system.