Storage Systems and Performance Management

Our activities in the area of storage systems are focused on new and advanced features for next generation storage systems.

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. 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.

On-line (web-based) storage services is an emerging market used as content depots (for email, pictures, and video), backup services, 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 commodity storage units. We also explore methods to support encapsulation of atomic contents (data objects and their metadata), allowing to easily store and access the data objects, and mobilizing the data objects across the cloud.

CDP (Continuous Data Protection) is an emerging technology designed to enable systems to revert to any point in time and recreate precise system/storage states. Our CDP project deals with applying CDP capabilities to block storage; block-based CDP is used to provide storage support for Virtual Machine availability and synchronize it with the systems state. We also develop security mechanisms for storage; the Capability-based Command Security (CbCS) technology provides a cryptographic mechanism to enforce access control at the storage device. In January 2008, our group standardized the CbCS technology in the T10 technical committee of INCITS.

Our group is involved with emerging storage standards, for example, the 100 Year Archive Task Force, XAM, SNIA Green Storage, 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.

Our activities in the area of performance management focus on performance problems of highly complex and heterogeneous IT systems, which span many stages in the IT systems life cycle: monitoring, identifying problems, analyzing, and even fixing when possible via self-healing approaches. We currently lead SHADOWS, an EU FP6 project for the design of self-healing systems. In the past, we worked on Automated SLO Derivation (ASD) - an automatic approach to better optimize Service Level Agreements (SLOs) in an IT system, focusing on response time. We aslo developed technology for Automated Threshold Setting (ATS), which automatically tunes the thresholds of components in a system to minimize false alarms.

Dalit Naor,