Thomas M Ruwart

University of Minnesota, Digital Technology Center, Intelligent Storage Consortium

The Object-based Storage Device Protocol and Quality of Service

Abstract

The Object-based Storage Device (OSD) protocol enables the communication of high-level I/O requirements from an application down to a storage device. The result is more effective and efficient utilization of the capabilities of the storage device in meeting the requirements of the application. This presentation describes research being done at the University Of Minnesota Digital Technology Center’s Intelligent Storage Consortium (DISC) involving an implementation of OSD to address the Quality of Service (QoS) between an application and an OSD disk device. The outcome of this research project demonstrates the effectiveness of OSD on QoS as well as describing the types of information that needed to be conveyed between the application and the OSD. A video streaming application is used to demonstrate the difference in QoS between a traditional block-based disk drive and an OSD.

Biography

Tom Ruwart has over 27 years of experience in the computer and storage industry starting in 1977 with Control Data Corporation.  His experience spans hardware and software from IBM mainframe disk drives to large supercomputer-class storage systems.  Aside from Control Data, Tom has worked for a start-up company, Edge Computer Corporation, The Minnesota Supercomputer Center, the University of Minnesota Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering, and Ciprico. Tom is currently at the University of Minnesota’s Digital Technology Center (DTC) coordinating the operation of the DTC Intelligent Storage Consortium (DISC) as well as consulting on several government-funded large-scale storage projects. As part of this work Tom is actively involved in the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) Object-based Storage Device (OSD) Technical Working Group (TWG) and the IEEE Mass Storage Systems Technical Committee. All these activities are focused on driving the research, development, and deployment of intelligent storage technologies, applications, and markets.