Garth Gibson
Storage Aggregation for Performance and Availability: The Path from Physical RAID to Virtual Objects
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Building 3 Auditorium - 3:30 PM
(Refreshments at 3:00 PM)

Dr. Garth Gibson, will talk about Storage Aggregation for Performance and Availability: The Path from Physical RAID to Virtual Objects. Almost two decades ago, Dr. Garth Gibson characterized five ways that multiple small disks could be used to "virtualize" a single large disk for better cost-performance and availability. Called the five levels of Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), this work started him on a career of storage systems research. Years later, with the advent of packetized SCSI over Fibrechannel networks, it became clear to him that disks would come out from behind servers and become first class citizens on a variety of networks, increasing parallelism, addressable storage, and the variety of fault domains. Beginning as Network Attached Secure Disks (NASD) and evolving into Object Storage Devices (OSD), such devices virtualize storage extents, encapsulating layout of variable length related data with extensible attributes and per-object access control enforced in each device. Now almost ten years of research has been done in multiple institutions, Garth has turned to commercializing the concepts in the Panasas Storage Cluster and others have completed the first round of standardization.

In this talk Garth will review the principles of RAID and object storage and discuss how Panasas combines RAID and object storage into a new level of storage virtualization enabling advances in high performance and high availability.

Garth Gibson is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Panasas Inc. and an associate professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Garth received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1991. While at Berkeley, he did the groundwork research and co-wrote the seminal paper on RAID, then Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks, for which he received the 1999 IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Storage Award for outstanding contributions in the field of information storage. Joining the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in 1991, Garth founded the CMU's Parallel Data Laboratory and the Network Attached Storage Device (NASD) working group of the National Storage Industry Consortium (NSIC). His NASD research with CMU and NSIC is a basis for the Storage Networking Industry Association's Object-based Storage Devices (OSD) technical working group, and its sister ANSI T10 OSD working group. Garth sits on a variety of academic and industrial service committees including the Technical Council of the Storage Networking Industry Association and the steering committee of the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST).

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Ben Kobler