MVSS: Multi-view Storage System

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 multi-view 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 the 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 the prototype implementation to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.