Flipstone: Managing storage with fail-in-place and deferred maintenance service models

The cost of managing storage systems has become one of the significant expense items in data centers. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of Flipstone, a new storage system with reduced storage management cost. Flipstone provides fail-in-place and deferred maintenance by aggregating large number of off-the-shelf, inexpensive storage systems. We show a significant improvement in total cost of ownership of storage systems by reducing the number of service calls when Flipstone is used.