History 2002: IceCube Architecture

IBM has long been trying to get in on the document management market, moving from concept to concept, the most recent incarnation known as Digital Library.

Now it has IceCube, a new storage architecture that comes quite close to that underlying Centera, and which should also allow its developer to address the increased demand for fixed content storage, although other applications are equally imaginable. IceCube is currently under development by a team of IBM engineers at the Almaden Research Center.

For the moment, it is only a prototype that has yet to be integrated into any finished product.

At the heart of the idea is what IBM calls “Collective Intelligent Bricks” (CIB), similar to EMC’s nodes or to the disk modules used in NetApp’s NearStore or Quantum’s DX30.

A brick, in this case, is a small cube that contains 12×2.5-inch HDDs with disk controllers, 1GB RAM, Intel processor, 8-port switch and 6 wireless “couplers” at 10Gb/s, one coupler for each side.

As with the popular Lego toy, the user can construct a column, a wall or even a blockhouse, by assembling cubes, each with 1.2TB capacity, in a variety of configurations, all communicating via couplers.

The cooling system will operate by means of a water flow (fountains in the computer room?!) rather than by fans.

The great difficulty here is to write the storage software that will operate the whole system, with automatic fault-tolerant management. After all, it’s an ambitious project. The idea is to perform security and recovery tasks without human intervention. By using virtualization and modularizaton, IceCube should perform load balancing and recovery from failures. Consequently, a brick that ultimately fails will be left in place, while the system merely reconfigures by itself, since the data will be replicated over many independent bricks. The only planned human involvement will be that of adding more bricks, in order to increase total capacity, initially slated at 5TB, then on to 1PB in the future.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 172 on May 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.