Atropos: A Disk Array Volume Manager for Orchestrated Use of Disks

The Atropos logical volume manager allows applications to exploit characteristics of its underlying collection of disks. It stripes data in track-sized units and explicitly exposes the boundaries, allowing applications to maximize efficiency for sequential access patterns even when they share the array. Further, it supports efficient diagonal access to blocks on adjacent tracks, allowing applications to orchestrate the layout and access to two-dimensional data structures, such as relational database tables, to maximize performance for both row-based and column-based accesses.