Policy-Based Autonomic Storage Allocation

The goal of autonomic storage allocation is to achieve allocation of storage resources, their performance monitoring, and hotspot elimination by specifying comparatively high-level goals, rather than by means of low-level manual steps. The process of automation should allow specification of policies as administrator specified constraints under which the resources are managed. This paper describes the system design and implementation experiences from a prototype autonomic storage manager being developed in IBM Research. The prototype is being developed for a storage network that includes a SAN switch, an IBM Enterprise Storage Subsystem, and AIX servers. Our early experience from this prototype implementation is that there are a large number of mundane manual steps in storage management and it is feasible to automate them such that the automation is driven by higher-level goals under policy control. However, to manage heterogeneous storage a standard ontology is needed for specification of goals and how to achieve them.