Promise Technology, RAID, Cloud Computing and UC Berkeley

 

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I happened on a number of blog posts about a company called "Promise Technology" and became more interested in these terms: "RAID" and "Cloud Computing" and because my grad school, Cal Berkeley is apparently at the center of the creation of this technology. Also, I think, particularly in the wake of the San Jose fiber-optic cable crime of yesterday, it's important to shed a light on the little-known areas of technology and how they impact us.

Promise Technology (according to its website) is "a global leader in the storage industry and as an innovator in RAID technology". OK, fine and dandy, but what's "RAID technology" and why is it important? First, when David Patterson, Garth Gibson and Randy Katz created RAID according to Wikepedia at Cal in 1987 and confirmed by Scientic Commons , it was called "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks" but some companies now call it "Redundant Array of Independent Disks". Ok, but why is it important?

It's important, and Cal Professor David Patterson's a Macher in this field. Patterson led the creation of RAID technology, increasing storage capacity dramatically and opening the door to the creation of the kind of web servers used today. But really it started as combining small disk drives into something called an "array" which is a way of arranging information so that each part can be gotten according to some specific code index -- in other words it's a way of "filing" information in a certain order then using that order to, say, make a calculation of something. We do this every day when we teach kids to count the number of items in a case, that number of items is an array of sorts. Programmers get computers to do that same act by writing arrays as in this case (ok, simple yes, but I want people to at least be exposed to these ideas.)

Thus, RAID is a storage technology that uses arrays and is widely used in the corporate world. Promise Technology is one of a number of companies that uses this Cal-created technology to store information or more to the point of what Promise does, is make hardware that "sees" an array of hard drives and stores, receives, and protects that data that's in them.

As an old Cal student and booster I hope you see this example of where our dollars public and private go at the university. At present, we need to change our spending priorties do that great California institutions like UC Berkeley get more money fro the State of California. California spends more money today on prisons than education; that wasn't the case when RAID technology was created. Cal's leadership and innovation in computer technology has helped transform the World around us for the better and caused the launch of a new industry and companies like Promise Technology.

Indeed, RAID served as a foundation for what we now call "Cloud Computing" which is using the Internet to, say, use a spreadsheet, rather than an old disk or CD that had a copy of, say, Microsoft Office and Excel on it. If you're thinking of Google Docs, you're on the right track.

So the next time you're poking around online and see some technical term you don't recognize, stop and research it rather than clicking by it. It will expand your understanding of the world and it may cause you to appreciate your public university more than you do.