An Informal Publication from Academia’s Premiere Storage Systems Research Center Devoted to Advancing the State of the Art in Storage Systems and Information

Human administration of storage systems is a large and growing issue in modern IT infrastructures. We are exploring new storage architectures that integrate automated management functions and simplify the human administrative task. Self-* storage systems (pronounced “self-star”— a play on the unix shell wild-card character) are self-configuring, self-organizing, self-tuning, self-healing, self-managing systems of storage bricks. Borrowing organizational ideas from corporate structure and technologies from AI and control systems, self-* storage should simplify storage administration, reduce system cost, increase system robustness, and simplify system construction.