Implementation and Evaluation of an Active Storage System Prototype

This paper presents the implementation and evaluation of an active storage system. Our prototype system is based on the multi-view storage system (MVSS). It uses the notion of views to support ”filtering” of data at the storage devices. Similar to views of a database in a multi-view database system, views in our system are generated dynamically and are not stored on physical storage devices. Each view of an underlying file is represented through a separate entry in the file system namespace. Our system is based on the existing device level interface and requires minimal change to file systems and OS. This paper presents the key features and an evaluation of the prototype system built on Linuxbased PCs. We provide results from example applications implemented on the prototype and discuss the various issues in optimizing the performance of such a system in mixed workloads.