IBM

IBM Haifa Research Laboratory http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/index.html is the largest IBM research laboratory outside the United States, with 500 researchers. The Storage and Systems technologies department at HRL is at the forefront of storage technology worldwide. This department is responsible, among other IBM technologies, for the development of advanced data recovery and business continuance functions for IBM’s flagship disk storage subsystems. The department has recently invented the iSCSI protocol, one of the most active areas in the storage industry today.

IBM’s HRL contributions to CASPAR will centre around the use of Object Storage for preservation systems. Preservation DataStore is a de-commoditized new storage concept that is based on the OSD (Object Storage Device) paradigm and assists in the storage aspects of the data preservation problem. It utilizes the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) ISO standard and provides a common interface to storage which facilitates encapsulating the data with large amount of metadata including context information, provenance information, formats, representation information, etc.  The new storage box will be a fundamental component of the CASPAR OAIS-based framework and architecture.

HRL brings its extensive experience with storage systems, and Object Storage in particular. The Object Storage team at HRL has been involved with this technology for over four years. It is an active participant in the OSD standard (Julian Satran from HRL is the co-chair of the standards group, and others are active members). This team developed an implementation of object storage, including an open-source driver, and participate in a demonstration of this technology with other vendors. See http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/projects/storage/objectstore/index.html