System Technologies and Services

The System Technologies and Services department at the Haifa Research Lab is one of IBM's technology innovation centers. Its mission is to develop leading-edge system and storage technologies for IBM's advanced IT products and services. The department is particularly strong in the areas of system software and system architecture, and supports IBM server and storage systems product lines and IBM Services business units.

We are in particularly interested in the emerging field of Cloud Computing, and we put a lot of effort on developing technologies to support this fascinating concept, as a part of the IBM Blue Cloud initiative. In particular, our work in system software focuses on the areas of virtualization and systems management, which we believe will be primary enabling technologies to make Cloud Computing become a marketplace reality. The department activities in this area influence a wide range of IBM system products, including IBM's xSeries systems (with a focus on blade servers), IBM's pSeries systems, IBM Systems Management, and more. We also develop advanced system and I/O architectures designed to deliver performance breakthroughs to IBM and the industry.

Our work in the area of storage systems focuses on developing new functions for data protection and availability, storage security, long-term data preservation, and storage power management as it relates to IBM's green technology initiative. A special focus area of our team is storage support for Cloud Computing. In this project, we investigate the architectural challenges of designing a highly scalable and cost-effective storage infrastructure, allowing to easily store and access data objects, and mobilize them across the Cloud.

Motivated by the proliferation of IT services as an emerging marketplace trend, we have recently started to conduct research on optimizing IT service delivery - an area which is receiving noticable attention from both industry and academia. For example, we work closely with IBM field professionals in the area of Business Continuity and Resiliency Services, where we contribute by developing capabilities for information protection, disaster recovery and more.

During the recent years, our team has achieved several landmarks in computer system technologies state-of-the-art. Our team has played a key role in the development of IBM's Virtualization Manager Software, announced in late 2006. This technology was recently recognized as the winner of the ServerWatch Product Excellence Award for 2007, and honored with the prestigious IBM Research Division Accomplishment Award for 2007. Some other well-known examples of work done in our department are the invention of the now standard iSCSI protocol and Object Storage technology; contributions to IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer; and our work on the advanced Copy Services in IBM's flagship storage platform. For these and other achievements, our team has been recognized multiple times by the IBM Research Division Accomplishment Award and received other honors, such as recognition of some of our team members as 2003 InfoWorld Innovators.

Across all our activities, our team works with internal IBM product organizations as well as with IBM customers. We engage directly in development and delivery projects, partnering with the following IBM business units:

• IBM Systems and Technology Group, home of IBM System products
• IBM Software Group, home of IBM middleware products
• IBM Global Services, delivering business consulting services and technology services to customers worldwide
• Sister IBM Research laboratories in California, India, New York, and Zurich
• IBM sales teams

We routinely work with standard organizations to set systems and storage industry standards. A recent example of our work in this area is the CBCS standard for secure access to networked storage. Our team has conceived and developed this standard, and then led the process of its approval by the T10 standards body.

Lastly, we collaborate with academic and industrial organizations on projects of mutual joint interest. These include the following activities:

• Reservoir. This is an EU FP7 project, where we lead a consortium of 13 European companies and universities who collaborate on developing an advanced infrastructure for Cloud Computing, based on deep integration of virtualization and grid technologies.
• Shadows. This is an EU FP6 project, led by our team, which focuses on developing tools and methods for designing self-managing systems, based on the DMTF/CIM and Eclipse/TPTP open standards.
• CASPAR. This is an EU FP6 project which focuses on tools and methods for preserving cultural, scientific, and artistic long-term data. The project builds on the Object Storage standard (conceived by our team and standardized by SNIA) and the OAIS standard.

Yaron Wolfsthal,