IBM Israel

The IBM Haifa Research Lab (HRL) was founded in 1972. The lab has grown steadily, now employing over 500 researchers working in areas such as systems and storage technologies, information retrieval, and more.  HRL is currently one of IBM’s main European centres for innovation.

Relevant Experience and Role in the Project

HRL is an IBM centre of competence in storage technology. The lab invented both the iSCSI storage protocol and the concept of Object Storage, leading the SNIA standardisation work in these areas. . This lab is responsible, among other IBM technologies, for the development of advanced data recovery and business continuance functions for IBM’s flagship disk storage subsystems. The lab is actively pursuing research in the area of long term data preservation and is a leading centre of competence in this area within IBM. The lab participated in the CASPAR FP6 project, in which HRL is the largest ICT partner, providing leading edge technologies for preservation aware storage. In addition to digital preservation, the storage group is conducting research on power management for storage systems. Storage cloud is a new emerging key activity in the group.  HRL is a centre of competence in cloud computing, worldwide supporting IBM in this area, and leads the RESERVOIR project (Resources and Services Virtualisation without Barriers), a large FP7 effort, addressing challenges of cloud-scale service deployment.

IBM Haifa will take a key role in the storage and the scalability aspects of APARSEN. IBM Haifa will bring its expertise in building preservation-aware storage systems which are scalable and efficient. It will also bring its expertise in storage cloud, including security, data reliability and data federation, to address scalability and cost.