Distributed data storage is a building block for many distributed systems
such as mobile file systems, web service replication systems, enterprise file
systems, etc. New distributed data storage systems are frequently built as new
environment, requirements or workloads emerge. The goal of this dissertation
is to develop the science of distributed storage systems by making it easier
to build new systems. In order to achieve this goal, it proposes a new policy
architecture, PADS, that is based on two key ideas: first, by providing a set of
common mechanisms in an underlying layer, new systems can be implemented
by defining policies that orchestrate these mechanisms; second, policy can be
separated into routing and blocking policy, each addresses different parts of the
system design. Routing policy specifies how data flow among nodes in order
to meet performance, availability, and resource usage goals, whereas blocking
policy specifies when it is safe to access data in order to meet consistency and
durability goals. This dissertation presents a PADS prototype that defines a set of distributed
storage mechanisms that are sufficiently flexible and general to support
a large range of systems, a small policy API that is easy to use and captures
the right abstractions for distributed storage, and a declarative language
for specifying policy that enables quick, concise implementations of complex
systems.
We demonstrate that PADS is able to significantly reduce development
effort by constructing a dozen significant distributed storage systems spanning
a large portion of the design space over the prototype. We find that each
system required only a couple of weeks of implementation effort and required a few dozen lines of policy code. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/6532 |
| Date | 15 October 2009 |
| Creators | Belaramani, Nalini Moti |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | electronic |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works. |
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