Adaptive Control for Anonymous Network-Attached Storage

The authors describe techniques for building an anonymous network-attached storage system. Central to the design is adaptation, which enables higher performance without administrative tuning. Via a range of simulation experiments and a prototype implementation, they quantify the costs of providing anonymous storage and explore the parameters to which system performance is sensitive. They find that adding anonymity to a network-attached storage system is indeed feasible, increasing the network load by only a small, constant factor. The manner in which data is stored and accessed is rapidly changing. In particular, Network-Attached Storage Devices (NASD) are an increasingly popular storage paradigm.