A key objective of the IBM Intelligent Bricks project is to create a highly reliable system from commodity components. By delaying service actions, possibly for the entire lifetime of the system, management of the system is simplified. This paper examines the hardware reliability and deferred maintenance of Intelligent Storage Brick (ISB) systems assuming a mesh-connected collection of bricks in which each brick includes processing power, memory, networking, and storage. On the basis of Monte Carlo simulations, the fraction of bricks that become unusable by a distributed data redundancy scheme due to degrading internal bandwidth and loss of external host connectivity is quantified.
Related white papers
Beyond Broadband - A Quiet Revolution
The benefits of the Internet, both for businesses and the consumer are widely documented. When people talk about 'broadband', however, most are talking about Asymmetric DSL (ADSL), which is...
Chulalongkorn University Deploys Cisco Service Control Engine to Optimize Bandwidth Usage for Researchers, Students and Staff
Chulalongkorn has been an early adopter of networking and Internet technologies, but the popularity of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking applications was beginning to consume a disproportionate amount of campus bandwidth, as...
WAP: Broken Promises or Wrong Expectations?
The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) was once hailed as the ultimate mobile Internet solution that would revolutionize how we use the Internet and mobile phones. As you may already know,...
Dealing With Sudden Bandwidth Changes in TCP
This paper proposes a novel technique to deal with sudden bandwidth changes in TCP. In the current Internet, sudden bandwidth changes may occur due to vertical handovers between heterogeneous access...
Smaller File Format Saves Service Company 300-Plus Hours Per Week on Data Backups
Hobart Service delivers, installs, and maintains equipment for the foodservice and food retail industries. With nearly 1,400 employees working from 97 locations across the United States, Hobart needed a more...
A Strategy to Manage Cache Consistency in a Distributed Mobile Wireless Environment
Mobile computing environments are characterized by slow wireless links and relatively underprivileged hosts with limited battery powers, predisposed to frequent disconnections. Caching data at the Mobile Hosts (MHs) in a...
Establishing a Trade-Off Between Unicast and Multicast Retransmission Modes for Reliable Multicast Protocols
The conventional approach to reliable multicast in computer networks relies on the retransmission on demand of lost packets. Existing multicast protocols adopt a static packet retransmission scheme (unicast or multicast)...

