The Challenges of Storage System Growth

Abstract

The scale, size and performance requirements of data storage systems are undergoing dramatic growth, especially in supercomputing environments. As data storage systems get exponentially larger, hardware and software failures are becoming exponentially more frequent. As we move to thinking about a storage system that is constantly in a degraded or failure state, we must rethink storage software design, storage software development, and testing practices. Two technologies, object storage and declustered RAID, provide a promising way forward to protect information availability, but also present their own challenges.

Bio

Denis Serenyi is a Senior Research Engineer with Symantec Research Labs in Herndon, VA. His research interests include large scale storage system design, network storage protocols, file systems internals and storage layout, and also peer to peer networking. After graduating Dartmouth College in 1996, Denis spent 5 years at Apple working on file servers, web servers, and the QuickTime Streaming Server. Previous to Symantec he was an architect at Panasas Inc developing their high performance object storage filesystem.

• Presentation Slides [PDF]