"COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENT BRICKS1. INTRODUCTIONCollective 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 storagesystems were not so highly developed. In those days computers were not common, only usedowing to high technological knowledge and experience one must have in order to deal with thestorage 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 computergiants.1943 -IBM Chairman Thomas Watson predicts, "There is a world market for maybe fivecomputers". In U.S.A there are only ten computers in 1951. (In 1951 there were 10 computers inthe U.S). 1977 -Kenneth Olson, President of Digital Equipment: “There is no reason for anyoneto 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 trendsand industry needs. Another good example is the current situation in the IT world, the amazinggrowth in digital data stored in special storage systems have led to high costs of administrationand a real problem to storage administrator’s work. Nowadays storage systems contain severalterabytes of data, but in the near future, according to the growing pace, these storage systemscapacities will be increased to petabytes. To lower the cost of the administration and to helpcreating 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 ITworld, 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 seminartopic.DEPT OF IT, PDCE 2009-2010 Page 1 COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENT BRICKS 2.AUTONOMIC-STORAGEThe 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 ofinformation technology is the cost and ease of administration. Nowadays a storage administratormust have wide knowledge not only in disk technology, but also in several network protocolsand architectures (like TCP/IP and Fiber-Channel), file systems and system architecture. Thisadministrator faces various problems like installation of new storage components and/or systems,the configuration of these components and systems and the reconfiguration and adjustments ofthe entire system, upgrading of existing systems and components, monitoring and trackingproblems. Virtually this is to be introduced every aspect of autonomic storage offers significantengineering challenges, testing and verification of such systems, and helping the storageadministrator 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. This concept is mainly used for the concept Current Storage Autonomic StorageSelf-configuration Corporate data centers have multiple vendors and platforms. Installing,configuring and integrating systems are time consuming and error prone.This is mainly based on the masive automated configuration could be process ofcomponents and systems follows high-level policies. Rest of system adjusts automatically andseamlessly. Self-optimization Systems have hundreds of manually set, nonlinear tuning parameters, and theirnumber increases with each release. The components of the collective intelligent bricks can be described for components andsystems continually seek opportunities to improve their own performance and efficiency.Arriangement of the collective intelligent bricks self-healing Problem determination inlarge, complex bricks can be performed systems can take a team of programmers’ weeks. Systemautomatically detects, diagnoses, and repairs localized software and hardware problems. Self-protection Detection of and recovery from attacks and cascading failures is manual. Systemautomatically defends against malicious attacks or cascading failures. DEPT OF IT, PDCE 2009-2010 Page 2 COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENT BRICKSIt uses early warning to anticipate and prevent system wide information can be failures. The idea to move computing ability to the disk is not new and it was already introduced inactive-disks concept, nevertheless the autonomic storage is a new approach with far-reachingconsequences and its aspects will be the next storage trends. Obviously, it will take several yearsuntil all the challenges of autonomic computing will be achieved, but meanwhile storage systemsincorporate autonomic computing features at several levels. The first level is the component levelin which components contain features, which are autonomic. The third level, heterogeneoussystems work together towards a goal specified by the managing authority.Adding a new brick to a working storage-bricks system has no affect on other bricks andthe only work needed is to plug the brick. The new brick will be automatically recognized by allthe other bricks and will be added to the storage pool. Another self-management feature is thewell-known load balancing done on both disks and network interfaces. Of course, the bricks haveother sophisticated to ensure the information will correspondently features such as replications,snapshots, disaster recovery and fail-over. EquaLogic’s self-managing architecture is called PeerStorage, in this architecture not only adding a brick is easy but also the management of the entiresystem, which contain numerous bricks, is easy. The entire management is automated and theadministrator does not have to self configure and provision the system, he just have to describethe system his needs and the bricks will co-work to respond to his requests.DEPT OF IT, PDCE 2009-2010 Page 3 COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENT BRICKS 3.STORAGE-BRICKSThe storage-brick concept bundles the use of of-the-shelf components, such as hard disksprocessor, memory and network, together with the autonomic strategy aimed to ease theadministrative work. Building can build the storage bricks from these components will provide acombination of several disks together with an intelligent control and management and networkconnectivity, while keeping the cost low. Figures illustrate the basic structure of a storage brick.This bricks can also used storage-bricks can be stacked in a rack creating a storage systemwith large capacity, as shown in Figure. The adding procedure is very easy, plug and playwithout special configuration and interruptions to other bricks and ongoing background work.This components are the used to several vendors already provide storage-bricks, the bricksare built from 8-12 hard disks, 200 (or more) MIPS processor, dual Ethernet ports and with aproprietary OS, their cost range from 10,000 $/TB to 50,000 $/TB. These bricks can run variousapplications, such as: SQL and mail. This storage bricks can be is to performed to utilized the table shows the available storage bricks 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 supplyintelligent brick: EquaLogic and LeftHand Networks. Both companies supply storage bricks with2 TB capacity and an automatic scaling features. Adding a new brick to a working storage-brickssystem has no affect on other bricks and the only work needed is to plug the brick. The new brickwill 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 andnetwork 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 PeerStorage, in this architecture not only adding a brick is easy but also the management of the entiresystem, which contain numerous bricks, is easy. The entire management is automated and theadministrator does not have to self configure and provision the system, he just have to describethe system his needs and the bricks will co-work to respond to his requests.DEPT OF IT, PDCE 2009-2010 Page 4 COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENT BRICKSCIBTo overcome this challenging problem of floor space and to create an autonomicstorage brick that minimize floor space consumption, IBM launched the IceCube project (nownamed CIB-Collective Intelligent Bricks). The purpose of this bricks project is to create highlyscalable and efficient, 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 ofphysical size (a tenfold reduction). Because the pile will consume a lot of power, a thermalproblem is inevitable. Therefore, IBM has used a water-cooling system instead of an air-coolingsystem. This way even more floor-space can be saved and the total power of the system isdecreased. 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 threecontrollers tied to a strong microprocessor and connected to an Ethernet switch (futureimplementations will use infiniband). A coupler is located on each side of the brick, that way thebrick can communicate at the rate of 10 GB/sec with adjoining bricks. The total throughput of abrick 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 futuregoal of IBM is to create a cube with up to 700 bricks. These goals are achieved by simple andcommon 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 loadbalancing. After adding a new brick, the configuration procedure is done automatically and otherbricks 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 isleft 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, nohuman action is needed, except for adding bricks as system need more storage. Adding a newbrick to a working storage-bricks system has no affect on other bricks and the only work neededis to plug the brick. The new brick will be automatically recognized by all the other bricks andwill be added to the storage pool. Another self-management feature is the well-known loadbalancing done on both disks and network interfaces.DEPT OF IT, PDCE 2009-2010 Page 5 COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENT BRICKS 4 .IBM’SLA TEST&GREATEST Collective Intelligent Brick SystemsIf you ever want to generateingenious storage system ideas, takean extended sailing trip. At least,that is what Winfried Wilcke did.As program manager of AdvancedStorage Systems for IBM Research,Wilke's ideas may be realized as thefuture of smarter computing. Hisvision? Collective Intelligent BrickCollective Intelligent Bricks areSystems. In one sentence, the CIBsIBM's latest prototype effort. Theseare simply a Rubik's Cube-shapedsmall bricks add up to one dynamitestack of standalone storage servers,storage system: 13.5GB of RAM andcalled bricks, that act together as25.9TB of hard drive space.one highly scalable, intelligentstorage system. If this prototype isproven to work, all the hype at IBM over the past few years the technology is toperfomes the may filter into corporate IT departments, giving administrators anew proficiency when deploying and maintaining storage systems. After almost seven years of research, documentation, and implementation, IBM isready to run the first prototype system, formerly codenamed IceCube, shortlyafter CIB software is ultimately designed to govern the system and performmanagement, security, and recovery operations without human intervention. IBMhas envisioned the bricks are very intelligent technology these large storageservers, ranging from 100TB to many petabytes of storage, as the initialapplication of brick servers. IBM believes that cluster-type computer servers andmixed computer/ storage servers are an obvious extension of the brick concept. DEPT OF IT, PDCE 2009-2010 Page 6 "