Timing-Accurate Storage Emulation: Evaluating Hypothetical Storage Components in Real Computer Systems
Abstract
Timing-accurate storage emulation offers a unique capability: flexibility of simulation with the reality of experimental measurements. This allows a researcher to experiment with not-yet-existing storage components in the context of real systems executing real applications. A timing-accurate storage emulator appears to the system to be a real storage component with service times matching a model of the component. This allows simulated components to be plugged into real systems, which can be used for application-based experimentation. Additionally, timing-accurate storage emulation offers opportunity to investigate more expressive interfaces between storage and computer systems. This dissertation identifies a pressing need for a new storage evaluation technique, discusses design issues for achieving accurate per-request service times in a timing-accurate storage emulator, and demonstrates it is feasible to construct such an emulator. We built a functional timing-accurate storage emulator and explored its use in experiments involving models of existing storage products, experiments evaluating the potential of nonexistent storage components, and experiments evaluating interactions between modified computer systems and expanded storage device functionality. We configured our emulator with device models representing an available production disk drive, a hypothetical 50,000RPM disk drive, and a hypothetical MEMS-based storage device, and executed application-level workloads against the models. We applied timing-accurate storage emulation in an investigation into storage-based intrusion detection systems. This demonstrates that our emulator accurately reflects the performance of modeled devices, the feasibility of including intrusion detection capabilities into a standalone processing-enhanced disk drive, and that extensions to existing storage communications paths may be used to transmit and receive information regarding configuration and operational status of such a devi
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 13, 2004
- Accession Number
- ADA497428
Entities
People
- John L. Griffin
Organizations
- Carnegie Mellon University