High Performance Storage Server

This proposal describes a high performance storage server that combines the best of existing technology with an innovative fuzzy logic control strategy that has the potential of providing substantially improved system performance. The proposed system fills a void in current technology by directly addressing the issue of intelligent pre-fetching of data. The pre-fetching mechanism is totally contained within the storage server and is thus applicable to a wide range of host computer systems and disk technologies. The two primary innovations in this approach are: 1) an adpative Neuro-Fuzzy Inference Engine (NFIE) and 2) a scatter-gather mechanism closely coupled to a large cache memory. The scatter-gather mechanism eliminates the need to manage cache fragmentation and its associated software overhead. This combination can provide a substantial improvement in the cache hit rate for read operations without sacrificing write bandwidth. The high performance storage server will directly benefit large data repositories, high performance scientific computing installations, and will be especially beneficial to network file servers. The plug-and-play design of the server makes these performance improvements immediately available to existing installations. Anticipated Benefits: This high performance storage server design has the potential for meeting the high I/O requirements of future generations of high performance computers. Its plug-and-play design alos permits its use in supporting the large installed base of high performance computer facilitieis thus allowing immediate commercialization of the produce.