Motivation
Emerging paradigm of network-based services
- today: e-commerce, online database services, search engines, and web servers
- tomorrow: above, plus thin-client/PDA infrastructure support
These services have unique demands
- vast storage needs (large operational and historical DSS databases)
- high access rates
- mix of transactional (ACID) and non-transactional accesses
- easy incremental scaling of storage and processing
- minimal administration burden
- easy setup, scaling, maintenance, repair, tuning, ...
- automatic dynamic adaptation to failures, workload changes, ...