XML Based Virtual Disk Modeling Language for Constructing Large-Scale Storages

Abstract

Recently, the demand of low cost large scale storages increases. We developed VLSD (Virtual Large Scale Disks) toolkit for constructing virtual disk based distributed storages, which aggregate free spaces of individual disks. The administration tool is important to manage a large-scale storage in stable and low cost. In this paper, we propose VDML (Virtual Disk Modeling Language), which is a virtual disk specific model description language enables to prospect its features and to support designing it for constructing a large-scale storage using VLSD. VDML is an XML based modeling language in which the features of virtual disks are described. We discuss on its effectiveness in this paper. Furthermore, heterogeneity is an important issue on large-scale storage. Furthermore, since there are few researches on reliability of heterogeneous RAID, we also discuss it and give an algorithm prospecting the reliability of heterogeneous RAID.