Peter Cornwell projects

boxspring

boxspring is a family of storage system products that are amongst the first commercial sustainable computing systems.

High Reliability

Conceived as very long life installation, component boxspring comprises power, communications and air monitoring systems as well as computing to enable a high level of reliable service availability to be maintained over long periods.

boxspring uses open systems techniques to enable upgrade using cost-effective, widely available components, repeatedly on a two- or three-yearly basis so that both storage capacity and performance keep pace with the state-of-the-art.

Storage capacities start at 1Tbyte usable, as an installation of three machines: two storage computers plus a secure routing computer and ancillary equipment - providing two local, mirrored copies of assets on RAID5, which can be separated at different locations 100m apart.

Scalable

Up to twelve 1Tbyte boxspring storage computers plus a router, communications, power and air management are accommodated in a single1900mm 19inch enclosure. By advances mainboard and disk vendors enable storage capacities to double economically every two years at only a few $100 cost.

Access to a boxspring installation is controlled using conventional Linux, Apple OSX and WindowsXP management tools from a wide variety of workstations over fast ethernet and Gbit connections. Very high network thoughput can be achieved using multiple network connections.

boxsprings are connected using a protected Gbit network to which access from user workstations and the internet is controlled by the secure routing computer - this ensures that a very high degree of integrity is maintained and that mirror computers are accessible only to administrators.