H2O: An Autonomic, Resource-Aware Distributed Database System

TL;DR

H2O is a distributed database system that autonomously manages data replication and load balancing across workstation machines to utilize idle resources, reducing manual administration and hardware costs.

Contribution

The paper introduces H2O, a resource-aware, autonomic distributed database that efficiently uses existing workstation resources for data management.

Findings

H2O effectively balances load across machines.

H2O autonomously replicates data to improve availability.

H2O reduces manual administrative effort.

Abstract

This paper presents the design of an autonomic, resource-aware distributed database which enables data to be backed up and shared without complex manual administration. The database, H2O, is designed to make use of unused resources on workstation machines. Creating and maintaining highly-available, replicated database systems can be difficult for untrained users, and costly for IT departments. H2O reduces the need for manual administration by autonomically replicating data and load-balancing across machines in an enterprise. Provisioning hardware to run a database system can be unnecessarily costly as most organizations already possess large quantities of idle resources in workstation machines. H2O is designed to utilize this unused capacity by using resource availability information to place data and plan queries over workstation machines that are already being used for other tasks. This paper discusses the requirements for such a system and presents the design and implementation of H2O.