Focus of Research

My current research work focuses on performance, reliability and availability aspects of corporate data storage systems. RAID systems were proposed in the late 80s as a way to use parallelism in a multitude of disks to improve the aggregate I/O performance. Today, RAID systems are an integral part of the product lines of most major computer and storage systems manufacturers. RAID systems rely on data striping across multiple disks to improve performance and on redundancy to improve reliability. For large disk arrays, reliability is a major concern. As the storage capacity and the data rate of each disk in an array increase, the traditional methods of mirroring or of simple, single-parity coding are no longer sufficient. In this project, the ZRL team is exploring advanced coding and performance optimization techniques to improve resilience to various kinds of failure modes encountered in modern RAID systems.

We are also addressing an IBM-wide research bet of “Scale-out” solution for enterprise server and storage, i.e. how to efficiently connect hundreds of thousands of storage bricks, e.g. RAID boxes, to provide a storage system that infinitely scales in performance, capacity and availability based on commodity components such as x86 microprocessors, SATA disk drives, and standard Gigabit Ethernet.