Minerva: An automated provisioning tool for large-scale storage systems
Guillermo A. Alvarez, John Wilkes, Elizabeth Borowsky, Susie Go, Theodore H. Romer, Ralph Becker-Szendy, Richard Golding, Arif Merchant, Mirjana Spasojevic and Alistair Veitch.
Abstract:
Enterprise-scale storage systems, which can contain hundreds of host
computers and storage devices and up to tens of thousands of disks and
logical volumes, are difficult to design. The volume of choices that
need to be made is massive, and many choices have unforeseen
interactions. Storage system design is tedious and complicated to do
by hand, usually leading to solutions that are grossly
over-provisioned, substantially under-performing or, in the worst
case, both.To solve the configuration nightmare, we present minerva: a
suite of tools for designing storage systems automatically. Minerva
uses declarative specifications of application requirements and device
capabilities; constraint-based formulations of the various
sub-problems; and optimization techniques to explore the search space
of possible solutions.This paper also explores and evaluates the
design decisions that went into Minerva, using specialized micro- and
macro-benchmarks. We show that Minerva can successfully handle a
workload with substantial complexity (a decision-support database
benchmark). Minerva created a 16-disk design in only a few minutes
that achieved the same performance as a 30-disk system manually
designed by human experts. Of equal importance, Minerva was able to
predict the resulting system's performance before it was built.
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Last modified: Tue Jul 10 21:36:53 PDT 2001
by Alistair Veitch (aveitch@hpl.hp.com)