IBM to reveal storage initiative for advanced applications
Thursday, February 4, 1999
By Ed Scannell
InfoWorld Electric
IBM on Monday will take the first step toward launching the second major piece of the next-generation Internet when it announces the Internet Distributed Storage Infrastructure (I2-DSI) initiative designed to support advanced applications such as real time broadcast and video.
The project will be led by the University of Tennessee’s Innovative Computing Laboratory. The effort is considered to be a vital part of the Internet2 project’s effort to create network services that will make collaborative research and distance learning more practical.
“Internet 2 is all about orders of magnitude more speed; new standards that make it possible to prioritize the packets; and new applications that are not possible on the Internet like doing remote [magnetic resonance imaging], collaborative design, or full screen distributed learning,” said John Patrick, vice president of Internet technology at IBM.
As part of this effort researchers at the university will be exploring ways to deliver high-bandwidth content, such as video, over public networks including the Internet. This type of research will help determine the best mix of networking and storage for delivering content as well as ensuring quality of service.
Part of I2-DSI is IBM’s Web Cache Manager, a product the company made available last year. As deployed initially in the project, the product will have a capacity of 6 terabytes. They will be installed at high performance backbone access points at the University’s Knoxville, Tenn. campus, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Indiana University, and several others.
“[The University of Tennessee] will install it in six different locations so we can begin to experiment and prototype the distribution of large amounts of video content. It will become the basis for how to deploy this on the World Wide Web over the next few years,” Patrick explained.
The goal of the project is to have demonstrable prototypes of applications by the end of this year that show the practical potential of the technology. Over the next three years the technology and applications will be “retrofitted” into the Internet, Patrick said.
“The Digital Storage Initiative is about getting prototyping underway to learn how it is going to work,” Patrick said. “It will tell us what sort of middleware is necessary to manage that kind of environment. The fact is, no one really knows because it has never been done.”
As part of its grant, IBM is funding the equipment needed for the development of testing of applications at the universities, a spokesperson said.
The I2-DSI launch is the second main piece of Internet2 to be delivered. The first was the high-speed fiber optic backbone launched in September 1998 by University Corporation for Advanced Internet Deployment (UCAID), called Abilene, which is now an operational network. The third piece is the upcoming Digital Video Initiative.
Patrick said the hope is that the prototyping work done at the University of Tennessee and the other selected universities would be available to be beta tested in commercial accounts by the middle of this year.
“We have some very large companies interested in this and we are in the process of identifying which companies should be involved,” Patrick said.
The Internet2 project is being lead by UCAID, which is working in concert with the government and an array of private computer companies to develop network-based applications for education and eventually business.
For more information users can contact www.internet2.edu or www.ibm.com/internet2.
IBM Corp., in Armonk, N.Y., can be reached at www.ibm.com.
Ed Scannell is an InfoWorld editor at large.
Go to the Week’s Top News Stories
Please direct your comments to InfoWorld Deputy News Editor, Carolyn April
Copyright © 1999 InfoWorld Media Group Inc.
InfoWorld Electric is a member of IDG.net
(See also IBM helps give Internet 2 next push forward)
