Distributed and Hierarchical Storage Systems

We discuss issues and technologies for implementing and applying distributed, high-performance storage systems. We review a range of software systems for distributed storage management, and summarise what we believe to be the most important issues and the outstanding problems in distributed storage research. We outline our vision for integrated storage management that is compatible with our DISCWorld wide-area service-based metacomputing environment. Very large on-line archives present a challenge and our driving force for developing a distributed storage system. In addition, robotic tape silos form the lowest level of many of these archives. Their integration into the storage hierarchy is often non-trivial, proprietary and expensive. We describe how our system can provide the necessary infrastructure for such applications.