Dynamic and Redundant Data Placement

We present a randomized block-level storage virtualization for arbitrary heterogeneous storage systems that can distribute data in a fair and redundant way and can adapt this distribution in an efficient way as storage devices enter or leave the system. More precisely, our virtualization strategies can distribute a set of data blocks among a set of storage devices of arbitrary non-uniform capacities so that a storage device representing x% of the capacity in the system will get x% of the data (as long as this is in principle possible) and the different copies of each data block are stored so that no two copies of a data block are located in the same device. Achieving these two properties is not easy, and no virtualization strategy has been presented so far that has been formally shown to satisfy fairness and redundancy while being time- and space-efficient and allowing an efficient adaptation to a changing set of devices.