Abstract: One of the biggest challenges in designing storage systems is providing the reliability and availability that users expect. Once their data is stored, users expect it to be persistent forever, and perpetually available. Unfortunately, in practice there are a number of problems that, if not dealt with, can cause data loss in storage systems. This talk will examine how NetApp storage systems maintain data integrity in the face of component failures.

Bio

Garth Goodson is a researcher at NetApp currently working on integrating Flash memory technologies into the storage system. Previously, he worked on Parallel NFS (pNFS), an extension to provide parallelism within the NFSv4 protocol. He is also interested in the use of virtual machines to provide software fault isolation. Prior to joining NetApp in 2004, Garth received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in Electrical and Computer Engineering under Gregory Ganger. For his thesis, Garth developed novel Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols using erasure-coding schemes to provide consistency in a distributed storage system (PASIS).