NAME:
comp.arch.storage
STATUS:
unmoderated
DESCRIPTION:
storage system issues, both software and hardware
CHARTER:
To facilitate and encourage communication among people interested in computer
storage systems. The scope of the discussions would include issues relevant
to all types of computer storage systems, both hardware and software. The
general emphasis here is on open storage systems as opposed to platform
specific products or proprietary hardware from a particular vendor. Such
vendor specific discussions might belong in comp.sys.xxx or comp.periphs.
Many of these questions are at the research, architectural, and design levels
today, but as more general storage system products enter the market,
discussions may expand into "how to use" type questions.
RATIONALE:
As processors become faster and faster, a major bottleneck in computing
becomes access to storage services: the hardware - disk, tape, optical,
solid-state disk, robots, etc., and the software - uniform and convenient
access to storage hardware. A far too true comment is that "A supercomputer
is a machine that converts a compute-bound problem into an I/O-bound
problem." As supercomputer performance reaches desktops, we all experience
the problems of:
o hot processor chips strapped onto anemic I/O
architectures
o incompatable storage systems that require expensive
systems integration gurus to integrate and
maintain
o databases that are intimately bound into the quirks of an
operating system for performance
o applications that are unable to obtain guarantees on when
their data and/or metadata is on stable storage
o cheap tape libraries and robots that are under-utilized
because software for migration and caching to
disk is not readily available
o nightmares in writing portable applications that attempt
to access tape volumes
This group will be a forum for discussions on storage topics including the
following:
>1. commercial products - OSF Distributed File System (DFS)
based on Andrew, Epoch Infinite Storage Manager and
Renaissance, Auspex NS5000 NFS server, Legato
PrestoServer, AT&T Veritas, OSF Logical Volume Manager,
DISCOS UniTree, etc.
>2. storage strategies from major vendors - IBM System
Managed Storage, HP Distributed Information Storage
Architecture and StoragePlus, DEC Digital Storage
Architecture (DSA), Distributed Heterogeneous Storage
Management (DHSM), Hierarchical Storage Controllers, and
Mass Storage Control Protocol (MSCP)
>3. IEEE 1244 Storage Systems Standards Working Group
>4. ANSI X3B11.1 and Rock Ridge WORM file system standards
groups
>5. emerging standard high-speed (100 MB/sec and up)
interconnects to storage systems: HIPPI, Fiber Channel
Standard, etc.
>6. POSIX supercomputing and batch committees' work on
storage volumes and tape mounts
>7. magnetic tape semantics ("Unix tape support is an
oxymoron.")
>8. physical volume management - volume naming, mount
semantics, enterprise-wide tracking of cartridges, etc.
>9. models for tape robots and optical jukeboxes - SCSI-2,
etc.
>10. designs for direct network-attached storage (storage as
black box)
>11. backup and archiving strategies
>12. raw storage services (i.e., raw byte strings) vs.
management of
structured data types (e.g. directories, database
records,...)
>13. storage services for efficient database support
>14. storage server interfaces, e.g., OSF/1 Logical Volume
Manager
>15. object server and browser technology, e.g. Berkeley's
Sequoia 2000
>16. separation of control and data paths for high performance
by removing the control processor from the data path;
this eliminates the requirements for expensive I/O
capable (i.e., mainframe) control processors
>17. operating system-independent file system design
>18. SCSI-3 proposal for a flat file system built into the
disk drive
>19. client applications which bypass/ignore file systems:
virtual memory, databases, mail, hypertext, etc.
>20. layered access to storage services - How low level do we
want device control? How to support sophisticated, high
performance applications that need to bypass the file
abstraction?
>21. migration and caching of storage objects in a distributed
hierarchy of media types
>22. management of replicated storage objects
(differences/similarities to migration?)
>23. optimization of placement of storage objects vs. location
transparency and independence
>24. granularity of replication - file system, file, segment,
record, etc.,
>25. storage systems management - What information does an
administrator need to manage a large, distributed storage
system?
>26. security issues - Who do you trust when your storage is
directly networked?
>27. RAID array architectures, including RADD (Redundant
Arrays of Distributed Disks) and Berkeley RAID-II HIPPI
systems
>28. architectures and problems for tape arrays - striped tape
systems
>29. stable storage algorithm of Lampson and Sturgis for
critical metadata
>30. How can cheap MIPS and RAM help storage? - HP DataMesh,
write-only disk caches, non-volatile caches, etc.
>31. support for multi-media or integrated digital continuous
media (audio, video, other realtime data streams)
This group will serve as a forum for the discussion of issues which do not
easily fit into the more tightly focused discussions in various existing
newsgroups. The issues are much broader than Unix (comp.unix.*, comp.os.*),
as they transcend operating systems in general. Distributed computer systems
of the future will offer standard network storage services; what operating
system(s) they use (if any) will be irrelevant to their clients. The
peripheral groups (comp.periphs, comp.periphs.scsi) are too hardware oriented
for these topics. Several of these topics involve active standards groups
but several storage system issues are research topics in distributed systems.
In general, the standards newsgroups (comp.std.xxx) are too narrowly focused
for these discussions.
--------------------------------------------------------
email me at rdv@isi.edu
Copyright 1996 Rod Van Meter