IBM says IceCube holds key to storage

IBM has seen the future of storage, and it looks like lego.

The Collective Intelligent Bricks project is Big Blue's strategy to introduce self-managing computing into the storage market and address customer demands for lower administration costs.

The basic component is the IceCube, a single building block containing everything needed to build a storage controller - disks, processor and network connection. Every complex storage product is made up from combinations of single bricks plugged together.

The cubes, like lego, can be piled high, reducing floor space requirements and associated environmental costs to one-tenth of traditional systems, claims IBM.

The philosophy is called Fail in Place, and the idea is to build enough redundancy into the system so it can keep working even if some of the individual bricks fail. With 20 per cent more bricks in the system than it needs, IBM says the device can keep running for up to three years.

IBM research shows that 50 per cent of faults are caused by mistakes made fixing the last problem, so the IceCube is a self-contained device to prevent service personnel from messing about inside the box creating new problems.

Another advantage is that no cabling is needed. A ceramic plate on each side of the brick holds sixteen silver compound connections providing 10Gb/sec bandwidth with its neighbour.

It's compact and cheap, with no need for expensive fibre channel or ethernet connections, says IBM research fellow Jai Menon.

'We are proposing to build a three by three block in the lab by the end of the year - something that size could store the entire US Library of Congress,' he said.