MVSS: An Active Storage Architecture

This paper presents MVSS, a storage system for active storage devices. MVSS offers a single framework for supporting various services at the device level. It provides a flexible interface for associating services to a file through multiple views of the file. Similar to views of a database in a multiview database system, views in MVSS are generated dynamically and are not stored on physical storage devices. MVSS represents each view of an underlying file through a separate entry in the file system namespace. MVSS separates the deployment of services from file system implementations and, thus, allows services to be migrated to storage devices. The paper presents the design of MVSS and how different services can be supported in MVSS at the device level. To illustrate our approach, we implemented a prototype system on PCs running Linux. We present results from example applications implemented on the prototype and discuss a variety of architectural issues including mixed workloads.