Automated Physical Storage Provision Using a Peer-to-Peer Distributed File System

The allocation and management of physical storage structures in relational database systems is a timeconsuming manual process undertaken by database administrators. If datafiles, redo logs and control files exceed the available disk space on a volume, then new space will need to physically allocated on a new device. This reduces availability due to downtime, and arbitrary assumptions are often made about sizing requirements in the allocation of new storage media. What is required is an infinitely extensible, logically striped volume that can request and access storage on demand. In this paper, we present a Peer-to-Peer distributed file system that creates a single, virtual striped volume that can be mounted as a normal logical file system through the Common Internet File System (CIFS). New peers contribute unused space as required by the dynamic and growing physical storage requirements of relational databases.