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Capacity planning, application/storage performance management, backup/restore operations, configuration management, security, and availability analysis are some of the key storage management responsibilities of a system administrator. Typically, storage administrators write scripts that automate many of these storage management tasks. As the number of business service level agreements, department policies, QoS goals, storage devices, protocols, applications, and users increases, it becomes difficult for system administrators to ensure performance, provisioning, availability and security goals by using ad hoc script writing approaches . Thus, systems management has been identified as one of the most important research areas by many leading researchers [9,26]. Storage vendors are trying to add sophisticated systems management functionality into databases, file systems, storage controllers, storage resource managers, storage area network managers, capacity planning managers and other storage management software. The major focus of these products is to reduce management complexity by allowing a system administrator to specify high level QoS goals with respect to expected performance,availability, provisioning, and security, and to automatically transform these high level QoS goals into low level system actions. Currently, this transformation process is built using the policy-based paradigm, where policies are specified as collection of rules that are in the ECA format (Event-Condition-Action) [14]. Rules define how the system behaves for different possible system states and goal values. At run-time, the management module simply invokes the rule that is applicable based on the event and system condition. Even though goal based storage management approach has been advocated as the silver bullet that can help to reduce the management complexity for system administrators, this approach has not gained much traction because current policy management frameworks are providing support for only simple and trivial storage management scenarios.
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Polus : Growing Storage