Integrating Portable and Distributed Storage
Niraj Tolia
This talk describes a technique called lookaside caching that combines
the strengths of distributed file systems and portable storage devices,
while negating their weaknesses. In spite of its simplicity, this
technique proves to be powerful and versatile. By unifying distributed
storage and portable storage into a single abstraction, lookaside
caching allows users to treat devices they carry as merely performance
and availability assists for distant file servers. Careless use of
portable storage has no catastrophic consequences. Experimental results
show that significant performance improvements are possible even in the
presence of stale data on the portable device.
Bio:
Niraj Tolia is a second year graduate student at Carnegie Mellon's
Parallel Data Lab working under Prof. M. Satyanarayanan. His research
interests lie in operating systems and distributed storage systems. In
particular, his current research focuses on making distributed file
systems more efficient over Wide Area Networks.
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