Center for Research in Intelligent Storage

Data deduplication is an essential and critical component of backup systems. Essential, because it reduces storage space requirements, and critical, because the performance of the entire backup operation depends on its throughput. Traditional backup workloads consist of large data streams with high locality, which existing deduplication techniques require to provide reasonable throughput.

We have developed Extreme Binning, a scalable deduplication technique for non-traditional backup workloads that are made up of individual files with no locality among consecutive files in a given window of time. Due to lack of locality, existing techniques perform poorly on these workloads. Extreme Binning exploits file similarity, and makes only one disk access for chunk lookup per file, which gives reasonable throughput. Multi-node backup systems built with Extreme Binning scale gracefully with the amount of input data; more backup nodes can be added to boost throughput. Each file is allocated using a stateless routing algorithm to only one node, allowing for maximum parallelization, and each backup node is autonomous with no dependency across nodes, making data management tasks robust with low overhead.

The Center for Research in Intelligent Storage (CRIS) is a partnership between universities and industry, featuring high-quality, industrially relevant fundamental research, strong industrial support of collaboration in research and education, and direct transfer of university developed ideas, research results, and technology to U.S. industry to improve its competitive posture in world markets. Through innovative education of talented graduate and undergraduate students, CRIS is providing the next generation of scientists and engineers with a broad, industrially oriented perspective on engineering research and practice.

Center Mission and Rationale

The goal of the Center for Research in Intelligent Storage (CRIS) is to push the boundaries of file and storage systems by exploring and developing new technologies and techniques to improve the usability, scalability, security, reliability, and performance of storage systems.

The Center is established in the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Minnesota, universities with strong ties to the storage system industry: Silicon Valley and Minneapolis have long been centers of the storage industry in the United States. Research projects in the Center are supported by industrial members, and the Center encourages frequent participation by industry employees in the projects: participation in weekly meetings via phone call, email discussions, and face-to-face meetings. The Center encourages students to engage member companies via summer internships, facilitating technology transfer and building strong ties that can result in full-time employment after graduation.

Support

The Center is primarily supported by its industrial membership and by funding from the National Science Foundation. The Center is part of the Industry & University Cooperative Research Program (I/UCRC) at NSF.

Companies interested in becoming members of CRIS should review the CRIS fact sheet, which contains links to the membership agreement and current bylaws.

Contact Information

Center for Research in Intelligent Storage
University of Minnesota
Digital Technology Center
499 Walter Library
117 Pleasant Street SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
612-624-9510
URL: http://www.cris.us/
Email: directors «at» cris.us

Center Directors

Ethan L. Miller (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Tel: +1 831 459-1222
Email: elm «at» cs.ucsc.edu

David Du (University of Minnesota)
Tel: +1 612 625-2560
Email: du «at» cs.umn.edu

Other Contacts

Cory Devor
UMN DTC Business & Research Development
+1 612 625-1716
Email: devor «at» dtc.umn.edu

Andy Hospodor
UCSC SSRC Executive Director
Email: hospodor «at» soe.ucsc.edu