Interchangeable Data Storage Bricks?

shokk writes "EWeek is reporting that IBM is working on a concept called Ice Cube Storage Bricks that uses a conductive ceramic or mylar plate to transmit data between bricks across an air gap. Research center staff member Robert Gardner says that the idea is 'to walk up to the system, attach the storage and then walk away.' No mention is made of what happens when a brick in the middle of the cube needs to be replaced and the whole thing needs to be disassembled. To be really effective, this would need to be teamed up with some sort of a backplane, but the tech is new and neat."

Dendrites.

[Anonymous Coward]

"EWeek is reporting that IBM is working on a concept called Ice Cube Storage Bricks that uses a conductive ceramic or mylar plate to transmit data between bricks across an air gap. "

Kind of like a neuron.

Re:Not sufficient

[jessecurry]

well at least allow him to remove any cube without having to remove all mirrors of a specific drive.
The physical design will probably require some optimization. If you wanted to mirror each drive to four others you could have four stacks, each rotated slightly in their arrangements, then a service tech could remove all of the drives leading up to a certain drive without interrupting the data flow(or really an entire stack). The data center would simply have to make a chart detailing the order to remove the drives in, the tech would just have to choose the correct stack.

Re:Not sufficient

[superpulpsicle]

You people are getting all worked up over vaporware. IBM in 1996 claims that terabyte hologram cubes that can write nonmechanically with a light flashing was supposed to be available in a decade. It's pretty much 2005, and I see no sign of that.

Re:Seems like a solution looking for a problem.

[timeOday]

I would rather use loads of desktops, each with a local RAID array.

That's what google [techworld.com] does, except they don't bother with (or need) RAID.