Towards Global Storage Management and Data Placement

As users’ and companies’ dependence on shared, networked information services continues to increase, we will see continued growth in large data centers and service providers. This will happen both as new services arise, and as services and servers are consolidated on one hand (for ease of management, outsourcing, and reduced duplication), and further distributed on the other hand (for fault-tolerance of critical services and to accommodate the global reach of companies and customers). This paper outlines the key research issues associated with the deployment and management of a global storage system to support this infrastructure. We build on our success in automatically managing local storage systems, and discuss how moving to a system of global data placement raises new challenges and areas of research. We believe that one of the key attributes of such a storage system is the ability to flexibly adapt to a variety of application semantics and requirements as they arise (many applications that will drive Internet data centers five years from now are only now being sketched on napkins) and as they change over time.