Senior Project - Perseus

DiskSuite is an unbundled Sun product that offers better performance, greater capacity, easier administration, and improved availability of disk storage on Sun SPARC systems. DiskSuite allows for mirroring, striping, and concatenation of physical devices into logical associations known as metadevices. Data availability and reliability are improved by three-way mirroring, in which file systems are duplicated (or mirrored) across several different physical devices. Disk striping can increase performance by spreading sequential data requests over multiple physical components, allowing some parallelization in data access. Concatenation increases capacity by grouping smaller physical components into a single, larger logical device. The information about the configuration and state of all metadevices is preserved in the replicated state database. The configuration of all metadevices is manipulated by system administrators by editing configuration files. Unfortunately, these configuration files can be quite complex.

The project involved the development of a graphical user interface for the Sun Online: DiskSuite product. This tool graphically displays and provides a means to change the configuration and status of metadevices. It assists the user in producing metadevice configurations, and also prevents the user from producing illegal configurations. Finally, it will automatically generate syntactically and semantically valid configuration files that may be input to Online: DiskSuite. The project was implemented in C, using OpenWindows and the XView user interface toolkit.