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IBM Developing Lego-like Storage Brick
AaronW writes "According to this story at EE Times IBM is developing a 32TB storage system built around blocks that can be stacked like Lego bricks. Apparently they will be connected in a 3x3x3 mesh using capacitive coupling and will be water cooled."
Surely LEGO owns the patent on this concept?
This is just a marketing ploy so they can sell storage Clusters shaped like Castles, Pirate Ships and the Millenium Falcon!
No I am serious, can you just imagine it?
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
"Just imagine a Lego cluster of these!"
That'll be the new obligatory smart-aleck remark about cluster computing technology. :)
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
Nice first post.. ppft.. *laughs at you*
slashdot!=valid HTML
"IBM's Ice Cube project aims to define a way for end users to easily maintain increasing amounts of data, while also plowing ground for a similar approach to computing systems."
Ice Cube? Lemme guess: They sell a bandwidth package for Internet hosting called "Ice T"
Their bandwidth monitoring and packet sniffer is called "Snoop Dog."
Oh wait...IBM's PS/2 had the MCA bus. Maybe that was a Beastie Boys reference. Maybe IBM has been into Rap and the like for a long time...
Am I wrong in thinking that this design may lead to a new approach to servers farm, where each cube offers some kind of power (processing, storage, networking, moka brewing), and the whole assembly keeps itself in shape?
/., the assertion "Imagine a cluster of these!" takes its full meaning: storage might be the first step, and only the bandwidth of the couplers is a limit to the usability of CPU cubes or networking cubes.
For the first time in the history of
More, the software part will certainly bring some huge advances in clustering, as the challenge of virtualising all those cubes may help in building self-repairing (or should I say self-dumping?) clusters...
Oh, and by the way, here is the first step to assimilation.
--
Arkan
I'm not sure I follow. They say they want it to be easily stackable, and fault tolerant (they specifically mention leaving blocks in place if they fail), but how do you combine that with a water cooling system?
With a water cooling system, you need to make sure that the joints between cubes are water-tight, and maintain them over time, thus defeating their "no maitance" theory.
Or am I missing something? Perhaps they could use "disk blocks" and "cooling blocks" and just swap out the "cooling blocks" if there is a problem? Still takes more work than air cooling, but less than inegrating it into every block would.
What about just leaving air holes, and using it in a chilled room? Most server rooms are chilled anyway.
Just some ignorant thoughts.
Colin Davis
Colin Davis
I have don't hold NEAR that much. I sure hope mine are upgradable.
--Travis
EOF
Will these be compatable with the Duplex blocks for the four and under crowd? So that while your kids imagination grows, so does their legos?
Someone hates these cans.
If I were IBM I would avoid Lego comparisions
and 2nd, I would change the name.
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
2. Tinkertoy: storage structures too delicate, engineers kept losing fins for making "windmill" structure.
3: Play-Doh: kept getting stuck in carpet.
4. Erector Set: engineers spent too much time making jokes about name.
See Robert Morris's presentation (6+MB PDF) from the USENIX File and Storage Technologies conference. The videos of the invited talks are also worth watching (if you can afford the b/width to get them).
The two most important improvements are:
The system is watercooled. Imagine this, you have 12 harddisks per cube. You certainly don't want to hear the fans which would be needed to cool all of them.
The second improvement, and you'll instantly see why this is coming from IBM, is that bad disks are not supposed to be replaced in the cube. They are simply turned off and the storage system works around them. If you need more capacity or can't live without the failed storage space, add another cube.
...do you end up having to pull em apart with your teeth? I'd rather not, I'm sure they get really hot.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Can you offset the cubes a bit, rather than lining the faces up perfectly? That would really open up more possible structures.
I think it's a given that, at least in places that have room for it, there will be some playful constructions made from these things.
Looks like an excellent step towards a truly borg like information technology system.
IBM: resistence is futile!
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i am wondering how to acces disk block (let's say it died [GXP anyone?] and needs to be replaced) that is somewhere in the middle of such construction.
I'm glad they finally announced this project I've been dying to talk about it. I talked to a researcher on this project while I was at IBM's Almaden Research Center.
I was blown away when they described it to me. I have to say that IBM is by far the greatest computer techonology research company. They take the top minds give them boat loads of money, ten years later they blow your mind with the completely innovative technology. I mean come on, cube storage?!?!
Too bad, they just can't make any inroads in the client side market. They invented the harddrive years ago and today they aren't going to even make any more client models.
Anyhow, I just wanted to talk about cube failures. Ice cube uses a 3x3x3 array of 27 cubes. But, the question is what happens if a cube goes bad. Essentially, you can never turn off Ice Cube. It's meant to be continuously running. If a single cube failure occurs the system just routes around it. To compensate you can stick more cubes on the outside. Of course, throughput will be hampered.
I asked the researcher what happens if say all the middle cubes burn out or when the throughput gets too damaged. He responds, "Well, given the failure rate, it probably won't be an issue until about ten years have passed, and by then we'll have much more powerful storage technology."
Finally, anything that is water-cooled is nifty in my book.
Is this the same IBM thats getting out of the disk storage system? So what are they going to use for hard disks... Fujitsu?????
There's no Freedom like UFP-dom
It's a geek thing.
Try deleting stuff on a terminal that doesn't support the backspace key, and it displays ^H instead of deleting anything.
...as known by anyone who has played with toys like Legos and iMacs, is: What colors do they come in?
I thought IBM was planning on Bailing Out of the Hard Drive Market? I guess IBM really does have multiple heads these days - although maybe like the article says, IBM's focus on this product is the hugely complicated software that will be necessary to make it work, rather than the hardware.
Websurfing done right! StumbleUpon
augment your senses: http://sensebridge.net/
even IBM isn't THAT dumb!
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
What if they use IBM drives? Then all the disks will die if used over 300+ hours a month.
What a marketing scheme--Force them to buy a whole new unit rather then just replace a part of it.
I find this storage technology troubling... There could be cubes the size of elephants floating around in there!
This problem is obvious, to anybody with an advanced degree in hyperbolic topology, m-hay.
there was an arcticle about this. It said that the main problem was electron leakage between the circuits. I wonder if IBM is just saying they're thinking about it or if they've solved it. I hope they post more info =D
Imagine the possibilities-- a Lego robot that can solve a Rubick's cube *and* store the contents of the Library of Congress.
Cache Rules Everything Around Me
This article IceCubes would mean cool computing at New Scientist covered the technology.
"Software ... core challenge"??? (This sentiment is in the context that IBM aren't totally clueless about this sort of thing ;-)
Starting with a simple schema:
- Low level disk manager carves up disks into globally uniform chunks - say 20GB for argument's sake.
- RAID manager does the usual RAID 5 stuff using chunks from different cubes.
- Logical volume manager combines/carves up logical raid arrays into user required sizes.
- And finally a robust resizeable filesystem presents space to the user (or go back a step to present a virtual block device to Oracle or anything else that likes to avoid filesystems.
OK - that's a simple schema from which a better system can be evolved - but the core technology exists now. 1- disk partitioning; 2- RAID; 3-Linux LVM, Veritas Volume Manager and many others exist; 4- Growable filesystems exist (reiserfs, Veritas etc etc. Need to work on the ability to shrink for a fully rounded solution. Stage 2 needs to be careful concerning topology to avoid bad latency problems.To make this truely plug and play (but not in the MS sense) inserting a disk-cube would see it tested, auto partitioned and put in a pool. The systems engineer would be required to create/delete/alter filesystems and/or virtual disks as they needed - and configure things like how many simulatenouse cube failures can the system tolerate, how many hot spare cubes are kept in the pool and so on.
The software to do the underlying stuff is here today - I'm using it - albeit rather manually. The automation/management software to make this polished isn't hard conceptually. Of course if you only wanted one filesystem like the article mentioned it would require even less configuration ;-)
I'm actually much more impressed with the hardware here. Very cool. Not sure about the 3D and "stacking" structure. Bugger to replace a dead cube in the middle. Unless you are supposed to leave it there and throw a new cube on the top? I'd go for a 2D stacking system with overlapping layers (like a brick wall) - but with the couplers designed so you can knock a brick out sideways leaving the others undisturbed. Hmm - just a thought...
Why can't women be like Hedy Lamarr - beautiful, talented and inventors of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum techn
This was posted a while back on /. I dun't know why old news gets everyone attention.
I could buy a hard drive that communicates wirelessly with my computer, and which is powered by the Tesla coil. I could just put it on a shelf near my computer and leave it in it's box.
That would be cool.
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Oh wait, it already is
They seem to use smaller 2.5" hard drives, like the ones in notebooks. It does mean smaller power consumption and less noise, but what does that do to performance is yet to be seen. Maybe they are betting on time to make them faster and technologicaly more advanced. Yet, after i read an article at TomsHardware about doing raid with 2.5" disks, i am a believer! Not! :)
/Pedro
/Pedro
Dead, but reportedly alive...
Karma whorin' since 1999
I feel that the "lego" comparison is a bit flawed - this to me suggests a completly sealed box which stores data, power being inductively coupled, data through RF, etc. Also, lego is designed to be built, taken apart, built again.
This system is meant to have 27 cubes in a 3x3x3 cube, and when part fails, it is supposed to remain in place. Low latencies and high throughput are due to their being interconnected to the surrounding bricks.
First issue here is, that people don't like seeing things fail, and leaving them. This thing contains a "fast x86 processor", a gig of ram, (later on) six port Infiniband switches, plus all the disks. One of these failing is expensive - and getting the middle brick out would require removal of many other bricks, and probably knock out the system quite well....
It isn't really exandable either. For 27 cubes, perhaps the 3x3x3 is the best layout or topology of the blocks, but as you increase the size of the array (100 bricks or something), a cube becomes far more complex, with longer paths between cubes, longer latency, impossibility of removing a central brick. Heat would build up in the centre (yes, they are watercooled, but every part will be making heat, and not all of them connected to the heatpipe and watercooling system).
Maybe some mad buckyball style arrangement would provide the shortest average path between disks (but this would require a lot of statistical work, and depend on how the data was stored, what sort of access was required).
We could end up with huge, weirdly shaped storage arrays, like in films.
The watercooling is a step forwards, working in server rooms is getting far too loud.
Reliability may be an issue - 2.5" disks which it uses are known to be not as reliable as their larger counter parts. And there are a lot of them in this (12x27 = 324 disks), so failure is almost guaranteed within a short time.
I think this may be more of a concept thing than a final product - certainly the lego and modularity aspects need to be re-thought.
Great - but will it die after 6 months of use - or not be fit for 24/7/365 use like some of their current drives?
To see the picture, click here:r ick.gif
http://img.cmpnet.com/eet/news/02/april/icecube_b
-Jake.
You're allowed to keep it running only 333 hours per month =(
Oh well
Expandable storage just by adding a brick... very cool! I hope they continue with this idea in other ways as well!
I have to say, I wish I'd thought of it first.
However, this does bring me back to an original idea that I had for a server room. The room will be entirely empty, with large square tiles on the floor. Each tile will have information on the hardware that is below it (server name, switches, routers, etc). And, each will have a latch of some sort. Then, you unlock the latch, and pull up, and a large storage bin below slides up on spring-loaded rails, and locks into place. Then, you service the parts that need working on (swapping tapes, changing bad hdds), and slide it back down. All of the hardware will be sub-ground-level, which will make for much easier cooling, and a lot less cluttered environment.
These Ice Cubes from IBM would make a helpful addition to this idea, except you could only have probably two or three servers to a tile, attached one on top of the other. And there would be no side-to-side connections.
Eh, it was an idea.
The speed of time is one second per second.
If you bothered to read the article, it's apparent that each cube is connected to an external sink (in this case, a water pipe/heat exchanger) by heatpipes. Someone could rig up a similar setup for conventional rack equipment, and cool a server room worth of equipment with a conventional A/C compressor!
) style design to use in their own invention.
The 3D mesh is designed for insane densities, when you really need that multi-terabyte installation. Presumably these would be used for supercomputing installations, and each would maintain two or more mirrored cube 'stacks'; when one's failure rate grew too high, you'd switch over to the backup while the techies ripped the other apart, probably over a week or two. Basically, they're trying to provide more storage in a bedroom-sized space than you could ordinarily pack into a gymnasium's worth of racks. Cray has been using the same capacitative couplers for a while, and apparently they really do provide some maddeningly speedy links.
The *big* question here is- why are they shoving x86s in the machines, when IBM's own PowerPC/Power4 designs exist, with *much* less heat dissipation? I assume this is IBM's left toe not knowing what its right arm is doing, but it says something when the research division couldn't find a BriQ (http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/briQ/
... with these!
Geez imagine if you have a hundred of these stacked in a cube and one at the centre springs a leak...
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
That's where a team will come in with a new stack with same capabilities and mirror the data in realtime. Bring down the old stack, replace the bad bits, mirror the stuff back over (because data would have changed in the meantime) and then send the bill. =)
There are hardware diskarrays like HP Virtual Array that can do this. Just pull one 36 disk out and stick a new 72 GB in and the array will automaticlt resize and start up sync up and migrare RAID-5 data to the new available space. Very cool, combine this with a inteligent volume-manager and filesystem that can resize automaticly and you have something that works simliar to the IBM IceCube concept.
s k_ arrays/midrange/va7400/index.html
http://www.hp.com/products1/storage/products/di
More like CINDER BLOCKS
This isn't exactly a new idea... Anyone remember the old apples where you upgraded the memory by stacking more memory on top of what you already have?
;)
Hmm, didn't those old apples have NUMA?
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
To put all their effort pushing a new technology, like this one. IBM has been quite creative in their devellopement over the year, maybe they felt it was time to pass to something else. Can't wait to see this...
I'd rather be sailing...
This is the ideal story for Slashdot - legos, data storage, a big company like IBM, new technology...
I mean, it's like it was tailor-made!
Must have been difficult choosing an icon for the story. I can just imagine the editor agonizing over the little lego, the ibm logo, the hardware nut... or maybe the Borg Gates icon just to get people to read it.
Why use an x86 processor? 1. Aren't there way more efficient processors out there? 2. Why use a competitor's CPU rather than IBM's own POWER chip? - Which happens to be one of those more efficient CPUs.
sure there isn't a caveat that says they are only supposed to be used for like five hours a day or something?
Some of us have fallen in love with the notion of giving without reserve-Raoul Vanegiem, Revolution of Everyday Life
A company call Tricord Systems has been developing software that can do this for years. Although their hardware is not the enterprise level IBM is offering, their software is a perfect match for them.
The RIAA is pushing for new legislation which would make it illegal to exchange Legos, having heard that they may soon be used to store .mp3's
This comes on the heels of IBM bailing out of the consumer HD market.
Are they going to have a 6 week waiting period if one of the drives fails? Are they going to tell people that their drives don't fail any more than anyone else's? Are their drives going to have extraordinarily high failure rates, in some cases 50%? Are they going to tell people that they are using their drives too much if they are on for more than 8 hours a day?
Sorry, but they can't even get consumer grade hard drives to work with any semblance of reliability. Why would people trust them to make drives that are obviously going to be targeted at high-end commercial boxes?
There is currently a class action lawsuit pending against IBM for their recent HD disasters that they unleashed upon the public. Maybe people should wait and see, before jumping on the next IBM storage bandwagon.
Here's the link to the lawsuit, if you are interested.
the "lego" is the size of a small refrigerator! unless they're using ipod sized drives.
Now that IBM have announced they are selling off their OEM storage division to Hitahi this becomes irrelevant.
It will not make it to market without funding.
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thanks for the link to Lego.com.
Otherwise I would have had no idea what you were talking about.
Really. Very helpful. Consider me subscribed!
I'd imagine the software for this would work a lot like freenet, assuming it will be fault-tolerant and hot-swappable. Files would probably be scattered about in such a way that if a piece is temporarily unavailable, it would find the missing piece elsewhere, with the possibility of additional storage coming online or going offline randomly...
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Tricord is filing for chapter 11. they were a dot com and have fairly worthless web based software. their investors were complaining about tricord being worthless two weeks ago.
High density magnetic storage for the purposes of building very large storage systems will hopefully soon be replaced by optical hollographic crystal storage. Once these systems reach production it will be possible to store hundreds of billions of bytes of data, transfer them at a rate of a billion or more bits per second and select a randomly chosen data element in 100 microseconds or less.
This will pretty much make all the obtuse magnetic data bricks and high density RDRAM obsolete! I would image that IBM knows this, but wants to make 32TB data storage systems a reality today and for now, only has magnetic disks at thier disposal.
That's funny, I never heard of a tenant being used this way...
Life steals from art.
20 years ago Heinlein discussed in his books a storage system he calls fine grained Welton cubes. They are closed independent systems, accessible wirelessly, very small, and expensive.
I think someone at IBM must have just read Time Enough For Love or another of the books in which Weltons are present.
I bet their next product annocement will be a new series of computers that are setient and want to become really hot human women so they can have a lot of sex with you. I think they will sell fairly well.
Time Enough For Love is one of the greatest books ever written. Go read it now....you are just wasting time anyway.
NO. From ZDNet
IBM and Japanese electronics giant Hitachi on Tuesday said they have agreed to collaborate on developing open data-storage systems as they take aim at industry leader EMC.
collaborate != bailing out.
Holy s-, it's Jesus!
The first "portable" computer I ever saw or used was like this. There was a base unit, and extra storage or a printer could simply snap onto the back via parallel port. Done printing? remove the printer box.
It was a very useful design, and I've been waiting for it to return to mainstream computing.
"IBM is developing a 32TB storage system built around blocks that can be stacked like Lego bricks"
...Will this be compatible with Tyco blocks?
Then take a few days sick leave for the chipped teeth and bleeding gums ;-)
Ali
"Windows and Linux can co-exist on the same machine." - Microsoft Corporation.
I've noticed a number of disparate posts about criticisms about the practical design of this storage system. While these criticisms certainly have validity, I'd offer this counterpoint:
Sure, IBM's view of the architecture's abilities may be idealistic. That being said, hasn't creative engineering been the force behind making innovative, yet seemingly impractical, designs feasible? What about Shannon's law, dial-up modem bandwidth and the development of better encoding schemes (I admit that I have only a rudimentary knowledge of Shannon's law).
For instance, if a module goes out, why would the architecture still be "blocking?" Wouldn't it be possible to scale up the bandwidth of adjacent busses to accommodate for this? (In the electric utility business, critical transmission paths are designed with 'double contingency'--i.e., if one critical transmission line goes down, another line will be able to pick up the remaining capacity. If THAT line goes down, a third line can handle the capacity of the other two. Wasteful, yes, but better than the unpleasant consequences of urban areas losing a large percentage of their electric power.)
Another valid point raised surrounded the issue of water cooling. Again, wouldn't good industrial design and advances in materials science (pipe sealing components, etc.) possibly help us here?
By the way, is this concept really new? After all, haven't the folks at n-Cube been using "3-D" interconnection schemes for a long time (i.e., MediaCube servers used to serve broadcast-quality movies at hotels, cruise ships, etc.)?
These cubes implement the 3D mesh (in real 3D! :)), and it has too long a latency for real multiprocessor computing. When you are accessing slow device (hard drive) you can live with this latency. If you want to run computation on this network, you'll notice that your efficiency is terrible. This is why interconnects in real supercomputers are either crossbars or some kind of multistage networks, maybe meshes, but 5-7D. Try packing THAT into lego blocks! :)
Paul B.
Can any Douglas Coupland fans say `Ooop'? :)
Everyone knows the best part about the lego fortress is the lego men to habitat it. Do I smell a IBM/Lego partnership?