Centralized systems management approaches have been recently investigated in the academia and implemented in the industry aiming to facilitate the deployment of disk images to groups of machines. The old approach of installing and configuring each machine individually is most of the time impractical and error-prone. However, no study to date has sought to investigate different design alternatives for storage systems supporting centralized disk image management, or evaluate their performance and scalability. In this paper, we first propose the notion of stackable storage as a mechanism to organize disk images on centralized storage servers, and show how this mechanism would help the system administrator to perform typical management tasks. We next discuss different design options by varying three key components of the stackable storage design space. Finally, we prototype the design options and evaluate their performance behavior and scalability.
By: Eric Van Hensbergen; Gorka Muzquiz; Fabio Oliveira
Published in: RC24124 in 2006
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