Towards global storage management and data placement

As users and companies increasingly depend on shared, networked information services, we continue to see growth in data centers and service providers. This happens as services and servers are consolidated (for ease of management and reduced duplication), while also being distributed (for fault tolerance and to accommodate the global reach of customers). Since access to data is the lifeblood of any organization, a global storage system is a core element in such an infrastructure. Based on success in automatically managing local storage, we believe that the key attribute of such a system is the ability to flexibly adapt to a variety of application semantics and requirements as they arise and as they change over time. Our work has shown that it is possible to automatically design and configure a storage system of one or more disk arrays to meet a set of application requirements and to dynamically reconfigure as needs change, all without human intervention. Work on global data placement expands the scope of this system to a world of distributed data centers.