Parallax: Managing Storage for a Million Machines

OS virtualization is drastically changing the face of system administration for large computer installations such as commercial datacenters and scientific clusters. A recent report by Gartner predicts that commercial use of virtualization will triple over the five year period beginning in 2004 [1]. While it is commonly held that OS virtualization improves the utility, manageability, and scalability of large-scale environments, we believe that it is not sufficient in itself. In this paper we argue that the next key challenge facing these environments lies in the dramatically evolving requirements for the management of persistent storage.