SVL: Storage Virtualization Engine Leveraging DBMS Technology

The demands on storage systems are increasingly re-quiring expressiveness, fault-tolerance, security, distribu-tion, etc. Such functionalities have been traditionally pro-vided by DBMS. We propose a storage management sys-tem, SVL, that leverages DBMS technology. The primary problem in block storage management is block virtualiza-tion which is essentially an abstraction layer that sepa-rates the user view of storage from the implementation of storage. Storage virtualization standardizes storage man-agement in a heterogeneous storage and/or host environ-ment, and plays a crucial role in enhancing storage func-tionality and utilization. Currently specialized hardware or microcode based solutions are popular for implementing block storage management systems, commonly referred to as disk controllers. We demonstrate how to take a gen-eral purpose commercial RDBMS, rather than a special-ized solution, to support block storage management. We ex-ploit the simple semantics of storage management systems to streamline database performance and thus attain accept-ability from a storage point of view. This work promises to pave the way for diverse and innovative industrial applica-tions of database management systems. 1