Title
Interposed Request Routing for Scalable Network Storage

Author
Darrell Anderson, J Chase, A Vahdat

Location
Duke

Date 
2000

New idea: Slice.  Introduce a microproxy (uproxy) which multiplexes disk
storage requests from clients to storage.  These uproxies may reside
in a programmable switch or network adapter, or in a self-contained
module at the client's or server's interface.  Their is one uproxy per
client.  The Slice prototype is implemented as an IP packet filter as
a loadable module in FreeBSD.  They split the storage workload into
three components:
1) high volume to large files
2) I/O on small files
3) operations on the name space or file attributes.

Like NASD, object, not file, based.  Discuss two forms of name space operations:
Mkdir Switching and Name Hashing.

Main advantage: if you've got a big network of clients, in order to
use NASD, you have to change the clients.  Here, with this level of
indirection, you don't.  Because the network may be encrypted, the
uproxy has to sit near the client or the server, above the encryption.