The Parallel Data Lab has propogated the NASD techonology in several ways:
A PDL/CMU spin-off company, founded by Garth Gibson, Panasas has employed NASD technology to combine a parallel file system with object-based storage. The Panasas Storage Cluster delivers scalable bandwidth and random I/O to accelerate application throughput and streamlines operations within single scalable namespace to accelerate productivity.
Lustre, a PDL/CMU derived product developed by Peter Braam, is a novel storage and file system architecture and implementation suitable for very large clusters. It has been developed and maintained by Cluster File Systems, Inc. Lustre is a next-generation cluster file system which can serve clusters with 10,000's of nodes, petabytes of storage, move 100's of GB/sec with state of the art security and management infrastructure.
T10 is a Technical Committee of the InterNational Committee on Information Technology Standards (INCITS). INCITS is accredited by, and operates under rules that are approved by, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). These rules are designed to insure that voluntary standards are developed by the consensus of industry groups. T10 operates under INCITS and is responsible for SCSI Storage Interfaces. Its principal work is the Small Computer System Interface (SCSI), including the family of SCSI-3 projects.
The Storage Networking Industry Association, SNIA, is an international forum of IT organizations, integrators, and developers committed to advancing the integration of mission-critical applications, systems, networking, and storage. This involves identifying, defining, promoting, and supporting specifications, architectures, and proposed standards for storage & networking as well as education, publications, conferences, and other events.
The Object-Based Storage Devices (OSD, formerly called OBSD) Technical Work Group enables the creation of self-managed, heterogeneous, shared storage for storage networks. The work is focused on moving low-level storage functions into the storage device itself, accessing the device through a standard object interface. The group plans to standardize and extend the output from the National Storage Industry Consortium's Network-Attached Storage Devices (NASD) Project and work closely with the ANSI T10/OSD committee.
The National Storage Industry Consortium membership consists of about sixty corporations, universities and national labs with common interests in the field of digital information storage. Corporate membership includes most major U.S. storage product manufacturers and many other companies from the storage industry infrastructure. NSIC has its headquarters in San Diego and was incorporated in April 1991 as a non-profit mutual benefit corporation.
The Participants in the NSIC/NASD project pursued the development, exploration, validation and documentation of the technologies required to enable the deployment and adoption of network-attached storage devices (NASD) and systems. This group is no longer in existence.
To broaden the Parallel Data Laboratory's participation base and accelerate the ability of its technology to enlarge storage marketplaces, CMU has established the Parallel Data Consortium. Effective consortium members stimulate and distribute Lab technology to the benefit of the storage industry as a whole and their competitiveness in that industry.
The Object Management Group is a consortium of over 800 software vendors, software developers and end users working to establish the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard. Simply stated, CORBA allows applications to communicate with one another no matter where they are located or who has designed them. These standards include: CORBA/IIOP, Object Services, Internet Facilities and Domain Interface specifications. OMG promotes the theory and practice of object technology for the development of distributed computing systems and its goal is to provide a common architectural framework for object oriented applications based on widely available interface specifications. The Object Transfer, Access, and Management (OTAM) Working Group under the OMG is active in defining a CORBA File System Facility interface for object-oriented distributed file systems.
The ability to scale processors and storage independently and linearly is a fundamental goal of NAS. The NAS concept physically disassociates storage from processors. Devices are no longer peripheral components of a processor but a separate and equal architectural entity. Storage can be managed, changed, and expanded with no impact on the processor configuration or operations.
The SSRC at the University of California, Santa Cruz is investigating the construction of large-scale storage systems using object-based storage devices (OSDs). An OSD is a network-attached storage device that presents an interface of arbitrarily-named data objects of variable size rather than sequentially numbered fixed-size blocks, to deal with the data storage details, such as request scheduling and data layout. Metadata is managed separately by one or more specialized metadata servers, which is critical to scalability, reliability and security. The separation of data and metadata storage and management provides very high access bandwidth to the large-scale distributed storage systems.