Research and Design of an Attribute-managed Storage-cluster Based on TCP/IP Network

With the growing scale of storage system, its requirements of performance, reliability, availability, and security are getting more and more complicated. The costs to manage storage systems will keep increasing and finally be higher than the systems themselves if this trend continues. Thus, intelligent and self-managing systems are required to automatically address the needs of these requirements. The proposed attribute-managed method in this paper describes and classifies the requirements of storage system with attributes, relating the attributes with certain access and storage strategies. Data are accessed and stored with the most appropriate strategies according to attributes pertaining to them. We finally present a prototype of an attribute-managed storage-cluster based on TCP/IP network with extensions to existing protocols and discuss the implementation structure in detail as part of this research.