Traveling to Rome: A Retrospective on the Journey

Starting in 1994/5, the Storage Systems Program at HP Labs embarked on a decade-long journey - to automate the management of enterprise storage systems by means of a technique the authors initially called attribute-managed storage. The key idea was to provide declarative specifications of workloads and their needs, and of storage devices and their capabilities, and to automate the mapping of one to the other. One of many outcomes of the project was a specification language they called Rome - hence the title of this paper, which offers a short retrospective on the approach and some of the lessons they learned along the way.