HP Labs Technical Reports

Mime: a high performance parallel storage device with strong recovery guarantees

Chao, Chia; English, Robert; Jacobson, David; Stepanov, Alexander; Wilkes, John

HPL-CSP-92-9R1

Keyword(s): disk array architecture, shadowing, transactions, intelligent disk

Abstract: Mime is a shadow-writing disk storage architecture that uses late binding of data to disk locations to improve performance. This results in a simple design with strong atomicity guarantees and a rich set of transaction-like capabilities. The shadowing system in Mime is designed to avoid synchronous updates of metadata during normal operation. Instead, metadata is recovered using an efficient combination of logging and inverted indices. Mime can be used to transparently improve the performance and failure characteristics of existing file systems. The extensions that it makes to typical storage semantics, together with its high performance offer ways to simplify file system implementations.

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