Enhanced Data Management for Virtualized Service Providers

Virtualization has been lately introduced for supporting and simplifying service providers management with promising results. Nevertheless, using virtualization introduces also new challenges that must be considered. One of them relates with the data management in the provider. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach for performing efficiently all the data-related processes in a virtualized service provider, namely VM creation, VM migration and data stage-in and stage-out. Our solution provides a global repository where clients can upload the task input files and retrieve the output files. In addition, the provider implements a distributed file system (using NFS) in which each node can access its own local disk and the disk of the other nodes. This allows each node creating VMs and executing tasks efficiently using the local disk. Furthermore, tasks can be migrated with minimum overhead, since it is not necessary to transfer the VM images, while maintaining their accessibility during the whole process. Moreover, migrated tasks can be executed accessing remotely to the disk without noticeable performance penalty as demonstrated in our evaluation.