IBM Israel Research Seminars

Database systems are bounded by the number of operations per second that can be delivered by the disk subsystem. Backup systems are bounded by the maximum bytes per second that can be written to tape. We explore the implications of these bounds on petabyte storage systems and provide empirical evidence that not all systems have the same access patterns.

About the Speaker
Elliot Jaffe is a seasoned industry professional currently working on his PhD in Computer Science at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Elliot has held chief technology officer (CTO) and vice president of research and development (VP R&D) positions at various high-tech companies, most notably PictureVision Inc, which he founded in 1995 and sold to Kodak in 2000. He has served as an Entrepreneur in Residence, and currently sits on a number of advisory boards. Elliot holds an MSc in Computer Science from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a BSc in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Elliot's technical focus has been on distributed systems, storage systems, and operating systems. His works include two-phase commit protocols, distributed system defenses, and large-scale storage applications. He is currently researching petabyte-scale archive systems, where hardware failures are commonplace and the data is infrequently accessed.

Elliot lectures on Perl and Python at Hebrew University. In his free time, he is a technical consultant, a city councilor, an amateur cook, and a father to six boys.