Claudio Fleiner

IBM intelligent Bricks project: petabytes and beyond

This paper provides an overview of the Intelligent Bricks project in progress at IBM Research. It describes common problems faced by data center operators and proposes a comprehensive solution based on brick architectures. Bricks are hardware building blocks. Because of certain properties, defined here, scalable and reliable systems can be built with collections of identical bricks. An important feature is that brick-based systems must survive the failure of any brick without requiring human intervention, as long as most bricks are operational. This simplifies system management and allows very dense and very scalable systems to be built. A prototype storage server in the form of a 3 × 3 × 3 array of bricks, capable of storing 26 TB, is operational at the IBM Almaden Research Center. It successfully demonstrates the concepts of the Intelligent Bricks architecture. The paper describes this implementation of brick architectures based on newly developed communication and cooling technologies, the software developed, and techniques for building very reliable systems from low-cost bricks, and it discusses the performance and the future of intellegent brick systems.

Reliability of modular mesh-connected intelligent storage brick systems

A key objective of the IBM Intelligent Bricks project is to create a highly reliable system from commodity components. We envision such systems to be architected for a service model called fail-in-place or deferred maintenance. By delaying service actions, possibly for the entire lifetime of the system, management of the system is simplified. This paper examines the hardware reliability and deferred maintenance of intelligent storage brick (ISB) systems assuming a mesh-connected collection of bricks in which each brick includes processing power, memory, networking, and storage. On the basis of Monte Carlo simulations, we quantify the fraction of bricks that become unusable by a distributed data redundancy scheme due to degrading internal bandwidth and loss of external host connectivity. We derive a system hardware reliability expression and predict the length of time ISB systems can operate without replacement of failed bricks. We also show via a Markov analysis the level of fault tolerance that is required by the data redundancy scheme to achieve a goal of less than two data loss events per exabyte-year due to multiple failures.