Storage Systems

Our activities in the area of storage systems are focused on new and advanced features for next generation storage systems and storage services. Our mission is to work with and enhance IBM's storage products and offerings [link to http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/]. We are working specifically with IBM storage technologies that were recently acquired by IBM and located close to our lab; these are the IBM XIV storage system, IBM Diligent for enterprise data de-duplication and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager FastBack (formerly FiesX).

We are very active in the area of Long Term Digital Preservation (LTDP), which deals with the preservation of large amounts of heterogeneous data for very long periods of time of tens or even hundreds of years. We participate in a large digital preservation effort (CASPAR) via the European FP6. In the Preservation DataStores project we develop preservation-aware storage, the storage foundation that will serve as a fundamental building block for digital preservation systems. We developed LTDPA, which is a tool to assess the maturity level of an LTDP trusted repository.

Designing power aware systems that help reduce the power consumption in next generation datacenters is a major challenge for the IT industry. Although storage systems consume about 40% of the total datacenter energy, very little has been done so far to reduce the power consumed by the storage components of the datacenter. One pioneering activity is Power Management for Storage Systems, which is part of IBM's Green Initiative. In this project we study the factors that affect power usage in a storage system, model a storage system and its components (taking power usage into account), and design power efficient storage algorithms. We specialize in workload-dependent storage power consumption, and developed a comprehensive study of the tradeoffs between key I/O workloads and their power consumption behaviors.

Cloud Storage is an emerging market that provides storage as an on-line web-based service. It is used as content depots (for email, pictures, and video), backup services, storage support for cloud computing, and more. In this project we investigate the architectural challenges of designing a data infrastructure for highly scalable and economical environments, built of multiple storage units.   We design a Content Store service for the cloud, a secure cloud storage for unstructured data and content depots that is continuously available everywhere for any device and application. Cloud Computing is a key focus area embraced by IBM, see IBM’s Blue Cloud Initiative.

In the past, we applied CDP (Continuous Data Protection) capabilities to block-based storage to provide storage support for Virtual Machine availability and synchronize it with the systems state. We also developed the Capability-based Command Security (CbCS) technology which provides a cryptographic mechanism to enforce access control at the storage device. CbCS was standardized in the T10 technical committee of INCITS.  Our group has been involved with emerging storage standards, for example, the 100 Year Archive Task Force, XAM, IEEE P1619, and OSD. In the past, our group developed and standardized the cornerstone technology of object storage, worked on early iSCSI prototyping and definition, and developed search capability in a file system.

Dalit Naor,