@InProceedings{asami:self,
  author = {Satoshi Asami and Nisha Talagala and David A. Patterson},
  title = {Designing a Self-Maintaining Storage System},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixteenth IEEE Symposium on Mass Storage
  Systems},
  year = {1999},
  month = {March},
  pages = {222-233},
  publisher = {IEEE Computer Society Press},
  later = {asami:bself},
  URL = {http://storageconference.org/1999/1999/posters/22asami.pdf},
  keywords = {parallel I/O, disk array, RAID, pario-bib},
  abstract = {This paper shows the suitability of a self-maintaining approach
  to Tertiary Disk, a large-scale disk array system built from commodity
  components. Instead of incurring the cost of custom hardware, we attempt to
  solve various problems by design and software. We have built a cluster of
  storage nodes connected by switched Ethernet. Each storage node is a PC
  hosting a few dozen SCSI disks, running the FreeBSD operating system. The
  system is used as a web-based image server for the Zoom Project in
  cooperation with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
  (http://www.thinker.org/). We are designing self-maintenance extension to the
  OS to run on this cluster to mitigate the system administrator's burden.
  There are several components required for building self-maintaining system.
  One is decoupling the time failure from the time of hardware replacement.
  This implies the system must have some amount of redundancy, and has no
  single point of failure. Our system is fully redundant, and everything is
  constructed to avoid a single point of failure. Another is correctly
  identifying failures and their dependencies. The paper also outlines several
  approaches to lower the human cost of system administration of such a system
  and making the system as autonomous as possible.}
}