Richard F. Freitas

Storage-class memory: the next storage system technology

The dream of replacing rotating mechanical storage, the disk drive, with solid-state, nonvolatile RAM may become a reality in the near future. Approximately ten new technologies--collectively called storage-class memory (SCM)--are currently under development and promise to be fast, inexpensive, and power efficient. Using SCM as a disk drive replacement, storage system products will have random and sequential I/O performance that is orders of magnitude better than that of comparable disk-based systems and require much less space and power in the data center. In this paper, we extrapolate disk and SCM technology trends to 2020 and analyze the impact on storage systems. The result is a 100- to 1,O00-fold advantage for SCM in terms of the data center space and power required.

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.

Storage class memory: technology, systems and applications

Storage Class Memory (SCM) is the term used to describe a new class of solid-state, nonvolatile memory technologies. There are several (≥10) such technologies currently under active research and development that are vying to become the SCM of choice. As a group, their performance is nearer memory than storage while their cost is nearer storage than memory. In the systems designers eye, these performance and cost characteristics blur the historic distinction between memory and storage. Exploiting SCM will require significant changes in the design of memory and storage systems. These changes at the system level will force or enable changes at the application level as well as opening up new application opportunities. In this talk we will discuss several of todays leading SCM technologies, discuss their potential impact on the design of memory and storage systems, consider the changes that might be needed to existing applications and explore some of the potential opportunities for future applications.