Reducing the Cost of System Administration of a Disk Storage System Built from Commodity Components
Satoshi Asami · 2000
Reducing the Cost of System Administration of a Disk Storage System Built from Commodity Components by Satoshi Asami Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science University of California at Berkeley Professor David A. Patterson, Chair This dissertation explores how to reduce the system administration cost of disk storage systems. There are several reasons why reducing the operator's burden is the key to success of large storage systems. One is that the cost of system administration usually dominates the budget of storage systems. Another is that an operator error on storage systems can easily have disastrous results. In the field of physiology and psychology, there have been studies that show reducing mental and physical stress on the operator is crucial in preventing human errors. This dissertation describes Tertiary Disk, a large-scale disk array system built from commodity components, and how we evaluated the feasibility of its design. Instead of incurring the cost of custom har...