Prepress

Global Research Collaboration at EMC Corporation

Thursday 22. January 2009 - Research and advanced technology groups across EMC and their university research partners are discovering and exploring technologies that will shape the information infrastructure of the future.

By Dr. Burt Kaliski, Ph.D.
Director of the EMC Innovation Network

The world is witnessing key “inflection points” in how information technology is delivered, managed, and used. Many areas remain to be explored:
Service-oriented infrastructures
Information-centric security
“Web 2.0” storage for millions of users
Information grids
Virtualization of information infrastructure within and across organizations
The EMC Innovation Network is a worldwide collaboration of advanced technology researchers exploring these and many other areas. Some, such as the technologists at RSA Laboratories and EMC Research China, are academically oriented. Others deliver commercial concepts as prototypes, product proposals, and patents.
EMC launched the network in May 2007 and continues to add to the network’s projects and partnerships.

Here’s a sample of advanced R&D projects ongoing across EMC:
Scalable file systems — EMC is working with academic researchers and open source developers to enable file systems to scale to the enormous capacity of modern storage systems. They are examining how to harden the IO (input/output) and file system stack for error handling and make systems repairable faster. On the academic side, EMC has worked with Carnegie Mellon University’s Parallel Data Lab and the University of Michigan’s CITI team. In the Linux realm, EMC has sponsored and actively participated in IO and file system development.
Learn more Parallel Data Lab and CITI
RFID security and privacy — Anticipating the billions, even trillions of tiny radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that will circulate in the coming years, RSA Laboratories is developing security and privacy technologies for the tags and the systems that manage them. EMC is doing this work with university researchers through the RFID Consortium for Security and Privacy. In addition, RSA is researching new and enhanced authentication techniques. Projects include Life-Question Authentication, Authentication by Vouching, and Secret Splitting.

eXtensible Access Method (XAM) — EMC Centera’s advanced development team is conducting research related to the XAM interface. University of New Hampshire is now testing storage-related products in its InterOperability Laboratory.

New technologies and power savings for storage — Technologists in the EMC Symmetrix business unit are looking at incorporating new technologies into the storage systems, and they are examining approaches and algorithms for power savings.
Physical storage — EMC’s researchers are tracking advances in storage tied to holography, micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), nanotechnology, and more. They are determining how such advances might affect the storage industry in the long term, and they are providing guidance to colleagues regarding potential application requirements.
Trusted infrastructures — As a partner in the Daoli Project, EMC Research China is collaborating with university researchers to design methods for obtaining assurance of “behavior conformity” in distributed systems such as information grids, through a combination of trusted computing and virtualization.

University research partnerships
EMC’s research and advanced technology groups participate in several university research programs and consortia. Some recent examples:
Carnegie Mellon University — EMC is a longstanding participant in Carnegie Mellon University’s Parallel Data Lab, benefiting from the lab’s insights into many areas of storage systems research.

Daoli Project team — Four universities in China—Fudan University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, and Wuhan University—join EMC Research China in explorations of trusted infrastructure technologies. The team’s research collaborations are now available for others to view and comment on in a public wiki.

Indiana University — EMC is a founding industry member of the Center for Data and Search Informatics hosted at Indiana University, and anticipates joint explorations in areas including search, discovery, and large-scale data.

Renmin University of China — The Lab for Web and Mobile Data Management partners with EMC Research China on personal information management.

RFID Consortium for Security and Privacy — As part of this partnership between academic and industrial scientists specializing in RFID security and privacy, participants including faculty from Johns Hopkins University and University of Massachusetts, Amherst are conducting open research and educating the next-generation workforce to develop, deploy, and maintain secure RFID infrastructures.

Stanford University — RSA Laboratories is collaborating on enhancements to Stanford University’s PwdHash software to support RSA SecurID one-time passwords. The project, funded by the US Department of Homeland Security, aims to develop more trustworthy interfaces for providing passwords to web sites than the usual username/password dialogs. RSA also organizes a workshop series with Stanford on the topic.

University of Michigan — Technologists in the EMC Celerra business unit are working with researchers at University of Michigan’s Center for Information Technology Integration (CITI) on integrating advanced features of the NFSv4 file system including parallel access with pNFS, security and transport enhancements, and automated testing.
Learn more CITI