Umbrella file system: Storage management across heterogeneous devices

ABSTRACT

With the advent of and recent developments in Flash storage, device characteristic diversity is becoming both more prevalent and more distinct. In this article, we describe the Umbrella File System (UmbrellaFS), a stackable file system designed to provide flexibility in matching diversity of file access characteristics to diversity of device characteristics through a user or system administrator specified policy. We present the design and results from a prototype implementation of UmbrellaFS on both Linux 2.4 and 2.6. The results show that UmbrellaFS has little overhead for most file system operations while providing an ability better to utilize the differences in Flash and traditional hard drives. With appropriate use of rules, we have shown improvements of up to 44% in certain situations.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.3 File Systems Management

General Terms:
Design, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
Device characteristics, flash drives, namespaces, policy-driven storage