Engineering topics

Shields, Michael F.

Publications and source records attributed to Shields, Michael F..

3 records

NASA NTRS1996

A global distributed storage architecture

NSA architects and planners have come to realize that to gain the maximum benefit from, and keep pace with, emerging technologies, we must move to a radically different computing architecture. The compute complex of the future will be a distributed heterogeneous environment, where, to a much greater extent than today, network-based services are invoked to obtain resources. Among the rewards of implementing the services-based view are that it insulates the user from much of the complexity of our multi-platform, networked, computer and storage environment and hides its diverse underlying implementation details. In this paper, we will describe one of the fundamental services being built in our envisioned infrastructure; a global, distributed archive with near-real-time access characteristics. Our approach for adapting mass storage services to this infrastructure will become clear as the service is discussed.

Lionikis, Nemo M.↗

NASA NTRS1994

Robotic tape library system level testing at NSA: Present and planned

In the present of declining Defense budgets, increased pressure has been placed on the DOD to utilize Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) solutions to incrementally solve a wide variety of our computer processing requirements. With the rapid growth in processing power, significant expansion of high performance networking, and the increased complexity of applications data sets, the requirement for high performance, large capacity, reliable and secure, and most of all affordable robotic tape storage libraries has greatly increased. Additionally, the migration to a heterogeneous, distributed computing environment has further complicated the problem. With today's open system compute servers approaching yesterday's supercomputer capabilities, the need for affordable, reliable secure Mass Storage Systems (MSS) has taken on an ever increasing importance to our processing center's ability to satisfy operational mission requirements. To that end, NSA has established an in-house capability to acquire, test, and evaluate COTS products. Its goal is to qualify a set of COTS MSS libraries, thereby achieving a modicum of standardization for robotic tape libraries which can satisfy our low, medium, and high performance file and volume serving requirements. In addition, NSA has established relations with other Government Agencies to complete this in-house effort and to maximize our research, testing, and evaluation work. While the preponderance of the effort is focused at the high end of the storage ladder, considerable effort will be extended this year and next at the server class or mid range storage systems.

Shields, Michael F.↗

NASA NTRS1993

Mass storage at NSA

The need to manage large amounts of data on robotically controlled devices has been critical to the mission of this Agency for many years. In many respects this Agency has helped pioneer, with their industry counterparts, the development of a number of products long before these systems became commercially available. Numerous attempts have been made to field both robotically controlled tape and optical disk technology and systems to satisfy our tertiary storage needs. Custom developed products were architected, designed, and developed without vendor partners over the past two decades to field workable systems to handle our ever increasing storage requirements. Many of the attendees of this symposium are familiar with some of the older products, such as: the Braegen Automated Tape Libraries (ATL's), the IBM 3850, the Ampex TeraStore, just to name a few. In addition, we embarked on an in-house development of a shared disk input/output support processor to manage our every increasing tape storage needs. For all intents and purposes, this system was a file server by current definitions which used CDC Cyber computers as the control processors. It served us well and was just recently removed from production usage.

Shields, Michael F.↗