COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE BRICKS

Contributor: Anish Samuel

INTRODUCTION:

Collective Intelligent Bricks (CIB) deals with massive automated storage system. It is the
future of the data storage systems. In the earlier days of computer development the data storage systems were not so highly developed. In those days computers were not comm only used owing to high technological knowledge and experience one must have in order to deal with the storage system. In those days absence of high-density storage system also added to the problem. The situation in the computer field in earlier days could be seen from the words of the computer giants.

• 1943 -IBM Chairman Thomas Watson predicts, "There is a world market for maybe five computers". (In 1951 there were 10 computers in the U.S)

• 1977 -Kenneth Olson, President of Digital Equipment: “There is no reason for anyone to have a computer in their home.”

• 1981 –Bill Gates: “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”


These statements emphasize that it is difficult to predict the future technology trends and industry needs. Another good example is the current situation in the IT world, the amazing growth in digital data stored in special storage systems have led to high costs of administration and a real problem to storage administrator’s work. Nowadays storage systems contain several terabytes of data, but in the near future, according to the growing pace, these storage systems capacities will be increased to petabytes. To lower the cost of the administration and to help creating an easy to manage storage systems, vendors are working on intelligent storage-bricks. These bricks will consist of the shelf components, thus lowering costs, and the intelligent to self-manage the storage by themselves with no human assistant. The bricks are the future of the IT world, without them storing and managing data in the near future will be impossible.

Let us now briefly describe about the various sections intended to be dealt with in this seminar topic.

AUTONOMIC STORAGE

The basic goal of autonomic storage is, is to significantly improve the cost of ownership, reliability, and ease-of-use of information technologies. As explained, the main problem of information technology is the cost and ease of administration. Nowadays a storage administrator must have wide knowledge not only in disk technology, but also in several network protocols and architectures (like TCP/IP and Fiber-Channel), file systems and system architecture. This administrator faces various problems like installation of new storage components and/or systems, the configuration of these components and systems and the reconfiguration and adjustments of the entire system, upgrading of existing systems and components, monitoring and tracking problems. Another perspective in autonomic storage is the engineering challenges. Virtually every aspect of autonomic storage offers significant engineering challenges, testing and verification of such systems, and helping the storage administrator by easing installation, configuration and monitoring of those systems.
To achieve the promises of autonomic storage systems, systems need to become more self-configuring, self-healing and self-protecting, and during operation, more self-optimizing.

Concept Current Storage Autonomic Storage
Self-configuration Corporate data centers have multiple vendors and platforms. Installing, configuring and integrating systems are time consuming and error prone. Automated configuration of components and systems follows high-level policies. Rest of system adjusts automatically and seamlessly.
Self-optimization Systems have hundreds of manually set, nonlinear tuning parameters, and their number increases with each release. Components and systems continually seek opportunities to improve their own performance and efficiency.
Self-healing Problem determination in large, complex systems can take a team of programmers’ weeks. System automatically detects, diagnoses, and repairs localized software and hardware problems.
Self-protection Detection of and recovery from attacks and cascading failures is manual. System automatically defends against malicious attacks or cascading failures. It uses early warning to anticipate and prevent system wide failures.

The idea to move computing ability to the disk is not new and it was already introduced in active-disks concept, nevertheless the autonomic storage is a new approach with far-reaching consequences and its aspects will be the next storage trends. Obviously, it will take several years until all the challenges of autonomic computing will be achieved, but meanwhile storage systems incorporate autonomic computing features at several levels. The first level is the component level in which components contain features, which are autonomic. The next level, homogenous or heterogeneous systems work together to achieve autonomic. The third level, heterogeneous systems work together towards a goal specified by the managing authority. An example for the second level is the work of several storage bricks on a collective intelligent storage system.


STORAGE BRICKS

The storage-brick concept bundles the use of of-the-shelf components, such as hard disks, processor, memory and network, together with the autonomic strategy aimed to ease the administrative work. Building bricks from these components will provide a combination of several disks together with an intelligent control and management and network connectivity, while keeping the cost low. Figures illustrate the basic structure of a storage brick.

Storage-bricks can be stacked in a rack creating a storage system with large capacity, as shown in Figure. The adding procedure is very easy, plug and play, without special configuration and interruptions to other bricks and ongoing background work

Several vendors already provide storage-bricks, the bricks are built from 8-12 hard disks, 200 (or more) MIPS processor, dual Ethernet ports and with a proprietary OS, their cost range from 10,000 $/TB to 50,000 $/TB. These bricks can run various applications, such as: SQL and mail. The table shows the available storage bricks

Company Product Name Capacity
Snap Appliance Snap Server 80 GB – 2.16 TB
NetApp NetApp Server/Filer 50 GB – 48 TB

Still these bricks do not fulfill all autonomic storage aspects actually these are non-intelligent bricks that need administration and supervision. Currently only two vendors supply intelligent brick: EquaLogic and LeftHand Networks. Both companies supply storage bricks with 2 TB capacity and an automatic scaling features. Adding a new brick to a working storage-bricks system has no affect on other bricks and the only work needed is to plug the brick. The new brick will be automatically recognized by all the other bricks and will be added to the storage pool. Another self-management feature is the well-known load balancing done on both disks and network interfaces. Of course, the bricks have other sophisticated features such as replications, snapshots, disaster recovery and fail-over. EquaLogic’s self-managing architecture is called Peer Storage, in this architecture not only adding a brick is easy but also the management of the entire system, which contain numerous bricks, is easy. The entire management is automated and the administrator does not have to self configure and provision the system, he just have to describe the system his needs and the bricks will co-work to respond to his requests.

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENT BRICKS

To overcome this challenging problem of floor space and to create an autonomic storage brick that minimize floor space consumption, IBM launched the IceCube project (now named CIB-Collective Intelligent Bricks). The purpose of this project is to create highly scalable, 3-dimentional pile of intelligent bricks with self-management features. The use of the 3-dimentional pile, as illustrated in Figure 4.1, enables extreme reduction of physical size (a tenfold reduction). Because the pile will consume a lot of power, a thermal problem is inevitable. Therefore, IBM has used a water-cooling system instead of an air-cooling system. This way even more floor-space can be saved and the total power of the system is decreased. Another side effect, due to the usage of water-cooling system, is the reduced noise.

IBM’s brick consists of twelve hard disks (total capacity of 1.2 TB), managed by three controllers tied to a strong microprocessor and connected to an Ethernet switch (future implementations will use infiniband). A coupler is located on each side of the brick, that way the brick can communicate at the rate of 10 GB/sec with adjoining bricks. The total throughput of a brick is 60 GB/sec and the total throughput of a cube can rise up to several terabits per second, based on how many of the external facing couplers are linked up to a wire interface. The future goal of IBM is to create a cube with up to 700 bricks. These goals are achieved by simple and common concepts such as RAID and copies and by intelligent software that automatically move, copy and spread data from one brick to another to eliminate hot spots and to enable load balancing. After adding a new brick, the configuration procedure is done automatically and other bricks will transfer data to it. Another self-managements feature implemented by IBM is the fail-in-place concept, when a brick has malfunctioned no repair action is taken and the faulty brick is left in place. All other bricks will learn the problem and will work around the faulty brick. Because the data is scattered among several brick the data continues to be available. Thus, no human action is needed, except for adding bricks as system need more storage. The construction of a Collective Intelligent Brick is shown below.