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Umbrella file system: Storage management across heterogeneous devices

Published:31 March 2009Publication History
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Abstract

With the advent of and recent developments in Flash storage, device characteristic diversity is becoming both more prevalent and more distinct. In this article, we describe the Umbrella File System (UmbrellaFS), a stackable file system designed to provide flexibility in matching diversity of file access characteristics to diversity of device characteristics through a user or system administrator specified policy. We present the design and results from a prototype implementation of UmbrellaFS on both Linux 2.4 and 2.6. The results show that UmbrellaFS has little overhead for most file system operations while providing an ability better to utilize the differences in Flash and traditional hard drives. With appropriate use of rules, we have shown improvements of up to 44% in certain situations.

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    Elliot Jaffe

    All files are not equal. Some require additional security. And some are temporary and should be stored as simply as possible, while others may be permanent and should be stored on write once media. The traditional approach is to segregate files by type into different file system paths, with one or more paths for each file type. This paper continues the efforts to virtualize the underlying resources. From the user's perspective, all files look the same, but by virtualizing the file system, each file can be stored using the most appropriate available resources. Garrison and Reddy have developed a variant of the UnionFS that stores files in multiple file systems, based on predefined policies. The policies define how to store and retrieve each file, while all the files look as if they reside in the same user-visible file system. The concept of this paper is very elegant, and the implementation has a very low overhead. The major issue is that the authors avoid looking too hard at the challenges of specifying and managing policies. They correctly use simplistic policies as proof of implementation. Future research is needed to define appropriate policies and building metrics. Online Computing Reviews Service

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Transactions on Storage
      ACM Transactions on Storage  Volume 5, Issue 1
      March 2009
      62 pages
      ISSN:1553-3077
      EISSN:1553-3093
      DOI:10.1145/1502777
      Issue’s Table of Contents

      Copyright © 2009 ACM

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 31 March 2009
      • Accepted: 1 December 2008
      • Revised: 1 November 2008
      • Received: 1 July 2008
      Published in tos Volume 5, Issue 1

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