Intelligent storage for information retrieval

The rapid development of Internet, the fast dropping of storage cost and the great improvement of storage capacity have created an environment with enormous amount of data. How to get the data we want and how to mange these huge volumes of data become great challenges. There are a number of existing approaches for solving these challenges including semantic web, middleware, semantic multimedia information and databases. We are taking a different approach and believe that today's storage systems need to be fundamental changed to meet these challenges. In this paper, we first discuss the possible changes in storage systems. We then present the intelligence to be included in future storage systems. With the intelligence, a new architecture of storage systems can be formed. The essential concepts to be parts of the future storage systems include active storage, object-based storage, autonomic storage, and application-aware storage. We argue the Object-based Storage Device (OSD) concept is the most fundamental. We discuss a number of research issues of intelligent storage.