1. Department of Computer Sciences, UT Austin
Storage
Mike Dahlin, Barbara Liskov, Timothy Roscoe, Mema Roussopolous, Mehul Shah, Liuba Shrira, Debbie Wallach
September 13, 2018
Department of Computer Sciences, UT Austin

2. (1) Promising research directions/goals
Lots of good ideas
Personal data – access it forever, share it securely
I never should forget anything
Retrieve the data I want
Access any of my data from any device at any time
Securely share highly-available data after a major natural disaster
Make the world’s data available to 90% of the world’s people
Real-time access to big sensor-nets; find interesting streams of data; control data reduction
Auditable file systems, provenance
Grid file system that reduces network costs and improves performance v. grid-ftp
Zero-admin enterprise file system
Anonomized aggregate health data
September 13, 2018
Department of Computer Sciences, UT Austin

3. (2) Infrastructure needed
Lots of disk
Distributed testbed storage
Has lack of storage distorted use of existing testbeds?
Cluster testbed storage
“Infrastructure on which you could imagine inventing GoogleFS”
Workloads, faultloads, data sources
September 13, 2018
Department of Computer Sciences, UT Austin

4. (3) Infrastructure we can contribute
Models & OS abstractions for real-world failures
Workload traces
Software stack
Client interfaces
Universal replication toolkit
Higher-level storage services
Archival service, consistent snapshotting service, …
September 13, 2018
Department of Computer Sciences, UT Austin

5. (4) Research challenges
Abstraction of storage
File names and folders not the right abstraction
New unit of data = “location-independent big bucket of bits w/ certain availability/ performance/security properties”
Vertical silos v. generalized storage
Soft-state hardware, hard-state service
Restricted sharing/searching
Community sharing – club, emergency response, cross-business
September 13, 2018
Department of Computer Sciences, UT Austin

6. (4) Research challenges contd.
Managability, sustainability, applications, 24x7x365x100, …
Access control/auditing/revocation
Increasing value/sensitivity of data
Less attention: More data, more devices, non-experts user
Predicting/assuring long-term reliability
Eliminate management cost
September 13, 2018
Department of Computer Sciences, UT Austin