A Human Organization Analogy for Self-* Systems (CMU-CS-03-129)

The structure and operation of human organizations, such as corporations, offer useful insights to designers of self-* systems (a.k.a. self-managing or autonomic). Examples include worker/supervisor hierarchies, avoidance of micro-management, and complaint-based tuning. This paper explores the analogy, and describes the design of a self-* storage system that borrows from it.