Semantically-Smart Disk Systems.

In this paper we describe research that has been on-going within our group for the past four years on semantically-smart disk systems . A semantically-smart system goes beyond typical block-based storage systems by extracting higher-level information from the stream of traffic to disk; doing so enables new and interesting pieces of functionality to be implemented within low-level storage systems. We first describe the development of our efforts over the past four years, highlighting the key technologies needed to build semantically-smart systems as well as the main weaknesses of our approach. We then discuss future directions in the design and implementation of smarter storage systems.