Overview
We strive for the rapid transfer of our technologies to IBM products by working closely with our product partners. Here are a few examples of our product impact:
IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS): Originated by the File Systems team at IBM Research Almaden, GPFS is IBM's parallel, shared-disk file system for cluster computers. GPFS is used on many of the largest supercomputers in the world and is also used in commercial applications such as database, file serving, digital media and content management and has won numerous awards. Researchers continue to be involved in the evolution and deployment of new GPFS releases.
IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center: Researchers at IBM Research Almaden have made significant contributions to the IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center product (TPC). TPC manages file systems, databases, servers, networks and storage devices in an integrated manner. The research group made contributions to the product's infrastructure and advanced analytics. The infrastructure contributions include the design of the database, the CIM (Common Information Model) client and the topology viewer. The advanced analytics contributions included the delivery of policy-based planning and configuration-checking, change-management and datapath-explorer functionalities. The planning functionality includes host-, storage- and security-related planning.
Network Data Administration Facility (NDAF) on AIX® 5L: The Glamour project at IBM Research Almaden and IBM Research Austin was made available as the NDAF offering on AIX 5.3 TL5 in Fall 2006. The AIX® Network Data Administration Facility is an AIX solution for centralized creation, placement, replication, ongoing management, and namespace federation of filesystem data across a network of machines. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the provisioning of data on NFS version 4 (NFSv4) servers and the creation of a single NFSv4 exported file namespace that spans multiple server systems.
IBM Enterprise Disk Storage: Our storage researchers have developed a set of new caching technologies that have been incorporated in the IBM DS8000, its flagship enterprise class storage controller. These new caching algorithms are designed to help clients achieve dramatically greater throughput and faster response times than previous IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Server 800 systems, strengthening IBM's storage performance leadership. This research effort was recognized by the IBM Company as a Research Accomplishment in the year 2005.
IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC): This is an IBM storage virtualization product, which began as an IBM Research Almaden storage research project, and was named by IBM as an Outstanding Research Accomplishment for the year 2005.
IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM): TSM is a client/server based system that provides backup, archive, and disk space management services to a wide range of clients. TSM, which was formerly known as ADSTAR Distributed Storage Management (ADSM), is a technology developed by the Storage Systems group at IBM Research Almaden that has become a major force in the storage industry.
