Speaker: Garth Gibson
Carnegie Melon University, Panasas, Inc.

Monday, March 7, 2005
11:00 am - 12:00 pm
AP&M 4301

ABSTRACT

Almost two decades ago I 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 me on a career of storage systems research. A few years later, with the advent of packetized SCSI over Fibrechannel networks, it became clear 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 with almost ten years of object storage research having been done in multiple institutions and the first round of object storage standardization about to be published by ANSI, I have turned to commercializing the concepts in the Panasas Storage Cluster. In this talk I 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.

BIO

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).