Active Storage

Synonyms

Active Disks; Intelligent Disks

Definition

Active Storage is a computer system architecture which utilizes processing power in disk drives to execute application code. Active Storage was introduced in separate academic papers [1–3] in 1998. The term Active Storage is sometimes identified merely with the computer systems proposed in these papers. Two synonyms, Active Disk and Intelligent Disk, are also used to refer to Active Storage. The basic idea behind Active Storage is to offload computation and data traffic from host computers to the disk drives themselves such that the system can achieve significant performance improvements for data intensive applications such as decision support systems and multimedia applications.

Key Points

A research group at Carnegie Mellon University proposed, in [3], a storage device called Active Disk, which has the capability of downloading application-level code and running it on a processor embedded on the device. Active Disk has a...