Journal sdolgy's Journal: IBM Intelligent Bricks

I'm not at all excited or turned on about hardware. Then I read about the IBM Intelligent Bricks...

"This paper provides an overview of the Intelligent Bricks project in progress at IBM Research. It describes common problems faced by data center operators and proposes a comprehensive solution based on brick architectures. Bricks are hardware building blocks. Because of certain properties, defined here, scalable and reliable systems can be built with collections of identical bricks. An important feature is that brick-based systems must survive the failure of any brick without requiring human intervention, as long as most bricks are operational."

http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/502/wilcke.html

"A working prototype of such a system has been built at the IBM Almaden Research Center and performs as expected. It implements a 27-brick, 26-TB storage server. The system software is based on Linux (the OS for each processor), GPFS (the distributed file system), and Kybos (the management software specifically developed for the project). While it is purely a research project, extensive external exposure to IBM customers has yielded strong confirmation that the objectives of the project are well aligned with market needs."

Received July 5, 2005;
accepted for publication August 18, 2005;
Published online February 22, 2006.

Here's the link to the full IBM Journal of Research and Development
Volume 50, Number 2/3, 2006
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd50-23.html