Creating a programmable object storage stack

Abstract

The current file system and storage stack is restricted in the amount of information that flows from application to storage and from storage to application. This limits the ability of applications to tailor the storage system to particular needs of the application. In this paper, we investigate the programmability of the storage system stack and how to enable application aware storage. Our focus is on object storage systems because of its amenability to these ideas. We introduce two main ideas, namely enabling active objects in order to allow computation at the object storage system and the use of higher level object interfaces to enable intra-stack communications to allow application-aware storage and storage-aware applications. We show preliminary results using a key-value interface to access object stores directly.