Posted by : Anonymous on Aug 09, 2004 - 05:51 PM General

Swift, "on-demand" access to large-scale data storage is the goal of a prestigious research grant IBM Corp. has awarded to the University of Arizona Eller College of Management. The grant to Eller's management information systems department - consisting of tens of thousands of dollars worth of IBM computer equipment - was competitively awarded to the UA under IBM's Shared University Research, or SUR, grant program.

Officials say the project will place the Eller school at the forefront of data-storage research. It also continues a two-decade relationship between the school and IBM, including other research projects, recruitment and internships at IBM's Tucson Storage Systems development center.

The Eller research project addresses a thorny problem in which IBM and the university share a mutual interest: how to make sophisticated, super-capacity data-storage systems available to end users, quickly and on demand.

Today, such "storage networking" carries high costs in time and staffing to effectively manage data, prompting companies and institutions to look at ways to automate the process, UA officials said.

The UA team aims to design systems that can cut the time it takes to provision, or allocate, data storage from days to a few minutes.

"It's sort of an attempt to make providing data storage very much like providing electricity in your home - when you need more, you turn on a switch," said Ken Smith, Eller interim dean.

To reach their goal, UA researchers led by Eller professor Sudha Ram will look at tools including "work-flow management" software and wireless applications.

The team also will go beyond those areas to investigate broader issues of "dynamic data management," according to Ram.

The UA will itself will be a guinea pig, as researchers plan to examine ways to automate the allocation of data-storage across campus.

With massive data systems and hundreds of remote users, universities have a special need for on-demand computer storage.

IBM's equipment grant consists of four IBM eServer systems; six IBM ThinkPad wireless-enabled notebook computers; two IBM IntelliStation desktop computer stations; and a high-performance IBM xSeries 445 server that can run 30 "virtual" file servers.

The new equipment will be used with an IBM eServer and other IBM systems, including a storage network and robotic tape library, awarded to the UA about two years ago as part of another SUR grant.

Both IBM and the UA declined to place a value on the grant equipment, citing the competitive nature of the SUR grant program.

An IBM official overseeing the grant said automated storage systems could have applications in a broad array of data-intensive industries.

"Today, storage is kind of allotted in a fixed time," said Ken Boyd, a distinguished engineer with IBM's Storage Systems division development center in Tucson.