Storage Systems - Research Areas - Advanced Storage Systems

The Advanced Storage Systems department focuses on truly innovative solutions to enhance the reliability, scalability, security, performance, manageability and cost effectiveness of storage systems and controllers.

IBM's storage virtualization product, the SAN Volume Controller (SVC), started as a research project in this department was named by IBM as an Outstanding Research Accomplishment for the year 2005.

Our department was also responsible for inventing a new caching technology, Adaptive Replacement Cache (ARC), which was incorporated in IBM's flagship enterprise class storage controller, the IBM DS 8000. This research effort was recognized by IBM as a Research Accomplishment in the year 2005.

Data Integrity Protection Schemes: Techniques and algorithms to detect, report and correct silent data corruption events while maintaining system performance.

RAID Storage System for Petascale Supercomputers: IBM’s Programmable Easy-to-use Reliable Computing System (PERCS), chosen by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is one of two system designs to be developed and demonstrated as part of phase III of the High Productivity Computing Systems program (HPCS).

Storage Platform Resiliency: Evaluate and identify different system architectural techniques to increase software resiliency while maintaining existing storage system software investment.

Tiburon: IBM’s DS8000 Storage server is built on the POWER5 architecture platform, which supports logical partitions, or LPARs. The Tiburon project in Research explores the synergy between storage and servers by offloading appropriate application functions (including middleware such as DB2) into virtual machines running on storage controllers, to achieve better end-to-end value for our customers.

Wise Ordering of Writes: A novel and simple algorithm to manage nonvolatile write caches by combining temporal and spatial locality in an elegant way.

Deepak Kenchammana-Hosekote, Dingshan He, James Lee Hafner. REO: A generic RAID Engine and Optimizer, FAST'07 - 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2007.

Binny S. Gill, Luis Angel D. Bathen. AMP: Adaptive Multi-stream Prefetching in a Shared Cache, FAST'07 - 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2007.

KK Rao, James L. Hafner and Richard A. Golding. Reliability for Networked Storage Nodes., DSN-DCCS 2006 - International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, Jun 2006.

James L. Hafner. HoVer Erasure Codes For Disk Arrays., DSN-DCCS 2006 - International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, Jun 2006.

W. Wilcke, R. Garner, C. Fleiner, R. Freitas, R. Golding J. Glider, D. Kenchammana-Hosekote, J. Hafner, M. Mohiuddin, KK Rao, R. Becker-Szendy, T. Wong, O. Zaki et al. IBM Intelligent Bricks Project- PetaBytes and Beyond., IBM Journal of Research and Development, 50(2-3), 2006.

C. Fleiner, R. Garner, J. Hafner, KK Rao, D. Kenchammana-Hosekote, W. Wilcke, J. Glider. Reliability of modular mesh-connected intelligent storage brick systems., IBM Journal of Research and Development, 50(2-3), 2006.

James L. Hafner. WEAVER Codes: Highly Fault Tolerant Erasure Codes for Storage Systems, FAST'05 - 4th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2005.

James L. Hafner, Veera W. Deenadhayalan, KK Rao and John A. Tomlin. Matrix methods for lost data reconstruction in erasure codes, FAST'05 - 4th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2005.

Binny Gill and Dharmendra S. Modha. SARC: Sequential Prefetching in Adaptive Replacement Cache, USENIX'05 - USENIX Annual Technical Symposium, April 2005.

Binny Gill, Dharmendra Modha. WOW: Wise Ordering for Writes-Combining Spatial and Temporal Locality in Non-Volatile Caches, FAST'05 - 4th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2005.

Peter Radkov, Li Yin, Pawan Goyal, Prasenjit Sarkar, Prasahant Shenoy. A Performance Comparison for NFS and iSCSI for IP Networked Storage, FAST'04 - 3rd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2004.

Sorav Bansal, Dharmendra Modha. CAR: Clock with Adaptive Replacement, FAST'04 - 3rd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2004.

Lan Huang, Gang Peng, Tzi-cker Chiueh. Multi-dimensional Storage Virtualization, SIGMETRICS 2004 - International Conference on Measurements and Modeling of Computer Systems, 2004.

Windsor Hsu, Alan Jay Smith. The performance impact of I/O optimizations and disk improvements, IBM Journal of Research and Development , 48(2), 2004.

Windsor Hsu, Alan Jay Smith. Characteristics of I/O traffic in personal computer and server workloads, IBM Systems Journal 42(2), 2003.

Joseph Glider, Carlos Fuente, William Scales. The software architecture of a SAN storage control system, IBM Systems Journal 42(2), 2003.

Prasenjit Sarkar, Kaladhar Voruganti, Kalman Meth, Ofer Biran, Julian Satran. Internet Protocol storage area networks, IBM Systems Journal 42(2), 2003.

Prasenjit Sarkar, Sandeep Uttamchandani, Kaladhar Voruganti. Storage Over IP: When does hardware support help?, FAST'03 - 2nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2003.

Lance Russell, Stephen Morgan, Edward Chron. Clockwork: A new movement in autonomic systems, IBM Systems Journal 42(2), 2003.

Nimrod Megiddo, Dharmendra Modha. ARC: A Self-Tuning, Low Overhead Replacement Cache, FAST'03 - 2nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, 2003.

David Chambliss, Guillermo Alvarez, Prashant Pandey, Divyesh Jadav, et al. Performance Virtualization for Large Scale Storage Systems, SRDS, 2003.


Selected publications from all three research areas of Almaden Storage Systems can be found here.

Storage Management and Solutions

File Systems

More information on IBM-wide storage systems research can be found at IBM Research - Storage Systems