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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?
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
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.
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.
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.
"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
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
Here's a quick thought on how to keep a larger structure cooler, and possibly allow maintenance in the inner layers of blocks. How about a Sierpinski sponge?
The bigger the cube, the more perforations, and more ways to get at the inner cubes. Nearly all the cubes could be accessed since they would have an outer surface exposed. Of course, in a 3x3x3 structure you would have only 20 bricks instead of 27, but any of them could be accessed.