Storage Systems - Projects - CIB HW: Collective Intelligent Bricks Hardware

More than half of all families in the United States now have access to the Internet, and many enterprises are switching from proprietary to Web-based systems. We need to learn how to architect systems that reconcile the conflicting requirements of high availability versus engineering pressures of time, cost and shortage of skilled manpower.

The Internet itself has demonstrated that it is possible to build highly available systems using unreliable components. The key to such success is to build large assemblies of simple components and distribute functions in such a way that the failure of even a significant fraction of the components does not destroy the functionality of the overall system.

Intelligent Bricks - Hardware (previously referred to as IceCube) is an IBM Research-designed server architecture that follows these simple principles. It consists of a large, three-dimensional array (the "cube") of "bricks" that collectively provide a very high resilience against failure. In a storage server application, each brick contains multiple disks, a processor and network communications hardware. An extremely high-bandwidth, three-dimensional mesh connects the bricks, making the location of data within the cube nearly irrelevant. This allows software to scatter and replicate data over many independent bricks. The scheme provides high assurance against data loss, as well as high performance for large data sets, because subsets of the data can be retrieved in parallel.

With the Intelligent Bricks - Hardware architecture, human involvement is minimized -- software determines the location, dispersion and retrieval of data. If bricks fail, they are left in place, and software rebuilds the data in other bricks. Human involvement should be limited to adding more bricks to the cube as more storage is required, managing hosts and upgrading firmware. In a few years, one storage administrator should be able to manage a petabyte of storage, which is 100 times more than is typical today.

A desirable by-product of Intelligent Bricks - Hardware's three-dimensional architecture is very high density, requiring one-tenth of the floorspace of conventional systems that have the same capacity. In addition, total system power consumption is reduced.