ISTORE: introspective storage for data-intensive network services

Today's fast-growing data-intensive network services place heavy demands on the back-end servers that support them. This paper introduces ISTORE, a novel server architecture that couples LEGO-like plug-and-play hardware with a generic framework for constructing adaptive software that leverages continuous self-monitoring. ISTORE exploits introspection to provide high availability, performance, and scalability while drastically reducing the cost and complexity of administration. An ISTORE-based server monitors and adapts to changes in the imposed workload and to unexpected system events such as hardware failure. This adaptability is enabled by a combination of intelligent self-monitoring hardware components and an extensible software framework that allows the target application to specify monitoring and adaptation policies to the system.