NetApp Researching Long-term Archiving

By Greg McNevin

May 6, 2008: NetApp is taking strides towards long-life, self-healing archiving with a new project it is working on in conjunction with the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC).

According to searchstorage.com, the partnership is working on a combining commodity disks, Ethernet networking and solid state memory along with self-healing software to create hardware modules called “tomes”. From here the Tomes would be combined into a larger grid array which would proactively heal individual disks - theoretically eliminating the need for replacement.

Dubbed the Pergamum project, UCSC associate professor Ethan Miller says that the aim is to create a storage system that lasts for decades, one that uses far less power by spinning down disks when not in use, and one that ensures data is preserved if disks fail.

The system stores data on one or more Tomes, calculate parity information before spreading the data out. Three of these would be dedicated to parity, meaning if three in the group were to fail the data could be reconstructed.

Commercial applications for the potential technology are naturally a long way off, but NetApp is certainly evaluating how it can work it into its archivial products.

Comment on this story