Quality of security adaptation in parallel disk systems

In the past decade, parallel disk systems have been highly scalable and able to alleviate the problem of disk I/O bottleneck, thereby being widely used to support data-intensive applications. Although a variety of parallel disk systems were developed, most existing disk systems lack a means to adaptively control the quality of security for dynamically changing workloads. We address this gap in disk technology by designing, implementing, and evaluating a quality of security control framework for parallel disk systems, or ASPAD for short, that makes it possible for parallel disk systems to adapt to changing security requirements and workload conditions. The ASPAD framework comprises four major components, namely, a security service middleware, a dynamic data-partitioning mechanism, a response time estimator, and an adaptive security quality controller. The framework is conducive to adaptively and expeditiously determining security services for requests submitted to a parallel disk system in a way to improve security of the disk system while making an effort to guarantee desired response times of the requests. We conduct extensive experiments to quantitatively evaluate the performance of the proposed ASPAD framework. Empirical results show that ASPAD significantly improves the overall performance of parallel disk systems over the same disk systems without using the ASPAD framework. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.