Autograph

Storage management activities, such as reporting, file placement, migration and archiving, require the ability to discover files that belong to an application workflow by relying only on information from the file server. Some classes of application workflows, such as rendering an animated sequence from its graphics models or building an application from its source files, often exhibit a high degree of repeatability. We describe a system called Autograph that exploits this repeatability to discover files that belong to an application workflow. Our approach examines traces of file accesses, finds repeated and correlated accesses, and infers which files likely belong to the same workflow. Our solution targets server workflows and uses file server traces, which contain less process and file information than the local machine traces used in prior work. We show that Autograph successfully extracts workflow file signatures, even if the workflows are concurrent or share files.