Reducing Storage Management Costs via Informed User-Based Policies
Erez Zadok, Jeffrey Osborn, Ariye Shater, Charles P. Wright, Kiran‐Kumar Muniswamy‐Reddy, Jason Nieh · 2004
Storage consumption continues to grow rapidly, especially with the popularity of multimedia files. Storage hardware costs represent a small fraction of overall management costs, which include frequent maintenance and backups. Our key approach to reducing total storage management costs is to reduce actual storage consumption. We achieve this in two ways. First, we classify files into categories of importance. Based on these categories, files can be backed up with various frequencies, or even not at all. Second, the system may also reclaim space based on a file’s importance (e.g., transparently compress old files). Our system provides a rich set of policies. We allow users to tailor their disk usage policies, offloading some of the management burdens from the system and its administrators. We have implemented the system and evaluated it. Performance overheads under normal use are negligible. We report space savings on modern systems ranging from 25 % to 76%, which result in extending storage lifetimes by 72%. 1