Designing fair, efficient and scalable storage systems based on emerging storage technologies

The popularity of Internet and the rapid reduction of storage cost have encouraged the creation and usage of an enormous amount of data. How to store, access and manage the data becomes a challenge. In this dissertation we have explored a number of new technologies that address to meet this challenge. This dissertation consists of three research topics. The first one is the design and performance analysis of emerging storage interfaces including SSA (Serial Storage Architecture) and FC-AL (Fiber Channel-Arbitrated Loop). We have evaluated the performance of SSA and FC-AL under various configurations with future faster disks and discovered that it is important to have a storage interface with spatial reuse property. FC-TORN was designed to be such a future interface. We have delved into ways of enhancing FC-TORN with better degree of fairness. To incorporate fairness with communication sessions, we further proposed two new local fairness protocols: TNS (Total Number of Sessions-based fairness) and MNS (Maximum Number of overlapped Sessions-based fairness).; The second topic is the design of a video-on-demand system based on a cluster of severs connected to a set of storage nodes via a spatial reuse ring-based storage area network. The effects of striping and replicating are analyzed in terms of bandwidth and space requirements for such a VOD system. We have developed a heuristic algorithm to configure cost-efficient systems for a given set of access profiles. This algorithm can easily adapt to the dynamic change of access profiles.; The third topic is the design of an active disk file system (ADFS). Active disks are those disks with more but still limited on-board processing power and memory space such that certain computational tasks can be done by the disks. A new file system for active disks has been developed. Certain disk and file management tasks can be off-loaded to active disks so that the overhead of file accesses can be reduced.