Moore's growth of storage density is expected to deliver multi-TB multi-Gbps drives by 2004. This vast and fast storage, soon to populate networks, is likely to redefine our interactions with digital content. The "storage radio" and "storage TV" will play-out personalized "channels" from our set-top storage while "storage sites", mirroring web sites to our desk/set/lap-tops, will enable new interactive service modes.

These developments are likely to have profound impact on network computing. Networks will need to feed vast amounts of rapidly changing content into a large number of storage systems; assure consistency of this data; process storage flows at very fast wire-speeds; and route them based on their application-layer semantic. Computing systems will need to be reorganized to handle I/O speeds that exceed memory and CPU speeds, inverting the traditional speed relationships underlying traditional computing. I will describe the challenges presented by such storage networks and the unification of switching, server and storage systems that they inspire.


Yechiam Yemini (YY) is a Professorof computer science at Columbia University where he founded and directs the Distributed Computing and Communications (DCC) lab http://www.cs.columbia.edu/dcc. His research interests include computer networks, storage networks, network management, economics of information systems, distributed systems and protocols. He authored over 200 publications and 11 patents, and lectured widely in these areas. Technologies created at his DCC lab have been widely exported to thousands of sites and commercialized by several companies. Professor Yemini is a co-founder of three companies: Comverse Technology, http://www.comverse.com, an S&P500 and NASDAQ100 lead provider of multi-media message systems for telecom networks (1983);System Management Arts (SMARTS) http://www.smarts.com, a lead provider of software that automates network fault management (1993); and NeXtorage http://www.nextorage.com, a start-up developing high-availability storage networks.