Efficient Data Management Support for Virtualized Service Providers

Virtualization has been lately introduced for supporting and simplifying service providers management with promising results. Nevertheless, using virtualization introduces also new challenges that must be considered. One of them relates with the data management in the provider. This paper proposes an innovative approach for performing efficiently all the data-related processes in a virtualized service provider, namely VM creation, VM migration and data stage-in/out. Our solution provides a global repository where clients can upload the task input files and retrieve the output files. In addition, the provider implements a distributed file system (using NFS) in which each node can access its own local disk and the disk of the other nodes. As demonstrated in the evaluation, this allows efficient VM creation and task execution, but also task migration with minimum overhead, while keeping it accessible during the whole process.