Summary: Semantically­Smart Disk Systems: Past, Present, and Future
Andrea C. Arpaci­Dusseau, Remzi H. Arpaci­Dusseau, Lakshmi N. Bairavasundaram,
Timothy E. Denehy, Florentina I. Popovici, Vijayan Prabhakaran, Muthian Sivathanu #
Computer Sciences Department # Google, Inc.
University of Wisconsin, Madison Mountain View, California
Abstract
In this paper we describe research that has been on­going within
our group for the past four years on semantically­smart disk sys­
tems. A semantically­smart system goes beyond typical block­
based storage systems by extracting higher­level information
from the stream of traffic to disk; doing so enables new and in­
teresting pieces of functionality to be implemented within low­
level storage systems. We first describe the development of our
efforts over the past four years, highlighting the key technologies
needed to build semantically­smart systems as well as the main
weaknesses of our approach. We then discuss future directions
in the design and implementation of smarter storage systems.
1 Introduction
For the past four years our group has been working on
new ways to increase the functionality, performance, reli­

Source: Arpaci-Dusseau, Andrea - Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi - Department of Computer Sciences, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences