COLLOQUIUM
             Computer Science Department, Boston University

Speaker: Michael Kilian, Chief Technology Officer
         Centera, EMC

Date:  Friday, July 22
Time:  11:00
Place: Room MCS 135, 111 Cummington Street 
       (for directions, see www.cs.bu.edu/colloquium)

Title: The Opportunities of Content Addressed Storage

Abstract:

In the past decade, the death knell has sounded for many types of analog
data. Music has largely succumbed, photos are well on their way, video
and movies will complete the transition in the next 5-10 years.
Telephonics is largely digital, medical imaging is almost exclusively
digital, and the list continues. Anything that can be treated as
information can and is being treated as digital information. 

In April of 2002, EMC announced Centera, the first instance of a content
addressed storage (CAS) device to address these emerging markets. Unlike
conventional storage devices (e.g., block or file system-based), CAS
completely segregates the naming of an object from its storage location.
More to the point, the content being stored actually defines the address
of the object. Centera also associates metadata with every piece of data
so it can be better isolated from the application that generated the
object. 

This talk will introduce the concepts behind CAS, and particularly
Centera. CAS offers many intriguing possibilities for managing the
digital content that surrounds all of us. It is a storage device that
can be aware of the content it is storing. Given the dramatic decrease
in the cost of storage and the truly enormous (and distributed) address
space with CAS, should we bother throwing anything away? How do we
manage potentially trillions of things? Should we now focus on temporal
views of storage or will Google become the standard way of accessing
data? What happens when all of our personal information is digital and
online? 

By the end of this talk I hope you will not only be intrigued with a new
way of thinking about storage, but also challenged to think of new ways
of applying a new paradigm.

Biography:

Michael Kilian is the CTO for the Centera division at EMC. He is
responsible for product strategy including customer requirements
gathering and feature design. Previous to his current role, Mike
reported to the Chief Technology Officer as a Senior Technologist
analyzing technology and markets of the storage industry at large.
Michael built the strategy that led to the acquisition of FilePool, the
company that has written the software that forms the core of the Centera
platform. Michael joined EMC in the spring of 1997. Before EMC, Michael
worked at Kendall Square Research and Digital Equipment Corporation. He
holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Computer Science with a thesis
on Object Oriented Programming Methodologies for Massively Parallel
Computers. Centera uniquely blends objectoriented approaches to storage
using a highly parallel platform.

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