Stackable Fan-Out File Systems

Stackable fan-out file systems are file systems that can access more than one lower file system at once. Fan-out file system can therefore offer interesting applications such as unification, load-balancing, replication, failover, sand-boxing, and more. Fan-out file systems are particularly useful in the data grid area. However, operating systems are not designed to easily support fan-out file systems. In this project we develop OS infrastructure for stackable fan-out file systems as well as several practical fan-out file systems, addressing issues such partial failures, rollback of operations and state, and interaction with existing and new applications. We consider the ramifications of maintaining Unix semantics vs. enhancing the Unix API to support our advanced file systems.

Journal Articles:

# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 On Incremental File System Development PS PDF BibTeX ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS) May 2006  
2 Versatility and Unix Semantics in Namespace Unification PS PDF BibTeX ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS) Feb 2006  
3 Unionfs: Bringing File Systems Together BibTeX Linux Journal Dec 2004  

Conference and Workshop Papers:

# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 RAIF: Redundant Array of Independent Filesystems PS PDF BibTeX IEEE Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSST 2007) Sep 2007  
2 Kernel Support for Stackable File Systems PS PDF BibTeX 2007 Ottawa Linux Symposium Jun 2007  
3 Making Linux Stacking-Friendly BibTeX First Linux Storage and Filesystem Workshop, held in conjuction with the fifth USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST 2007) Feb 2007  
4 UnionFS: User- and Community-oriented Development of a Unification Filesystem PS PDF BibTeX 2006 Ottawa Linux Symposium Jul 2006  
5 Increasing Distributed Storage Survivability with a Stackable RAID-like File System PS PDF BibTeX First IEEE/ACM Workshop on Cluster Security, in conjunction with the Fifth IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2005) May 2005 Won Best Paper Award

Technical Reports:

# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 Storage Virtualization with a Stackable File System PDF BibTeX Stony Brook U. CS TechReport FSL-05-03 Dec 2005 M.S. Thesis
2 Versatility and Unix Semantics in a Fan-Out Unification File System PS PDF BibTeX Stony Brook U. CS TechReport FSL-04-01b Oct 2004  

Past Students:

# Name (click for home page) Program Period Current Location
1 Nikolai Joukov PhD Jan 2004 - Dec 2006 Research Staff Member, Storage and Data Services Research group, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (Hawthorne, NY)
2 Gopalan Sivathanu PhD Sep 2003 - May 2008 Software Engineer, Systems Infrastructure group, Google (Mountain View, CA)
3 Charles P. Wright PhD May 2003 - May 2006 Partner, Senior Software Architect, Illumon (New York, NY)
4 Jay Pradip Dave MS May 2003 - Dec 2003 Head of Product Management, Enterprise platform and Administrative experience, Qualtrics Qualtrics (Seattle, WA)
5 Puja Gupta MS Jan 2003 - Dec 2003 Software Engineering Manager, Darwin Runtime, Core OS, Apple Inc. (Cupertino, CA)
6 Himanshu Kanda MS Sep 2007 - Dec 2008 WorldEvolved (New York, New York)
7 Harikesavan Pathangi Krishnan MS Jan 2003 - Dec 2003 Software Engineer, Engineering department for WAFS product line, Packeteer, Inc. (South Plainfield, NJ)
8 Sunil Satnur MS Sep 2004 - Dec 2005 Staff Engineer, Storage and Avaliability Group, VMware Inc. (Palo Alto, CA)
9 Miretskiy "Eugene" Yeugeniy MS May 2003 - Dec 2004 Software Engineer Google (New York, NY)
10 Mohammad Nayyer Zubair MS Jan 2004 - Dec 2004 Software Developer, Bloomberg (New York, NY)
11 Mohammad Nayyer Zubair BS May 2003 - Dec 2003 Software Developer, Bloomberg (New York, NY)
12 Abhishek Rai temp-PhD Sep 2003 - Aug 2005 Principal Engineer, ThoughtSpot Inc. (Palo Alto, CA)

Sponsors:

# Sponsor Amount Period Type Title (click for award abstract)
1 NSF Trusted Computing (TC) $400,000 2003-2006 Sole PI A Layered Approach to Securing Network File Systems