Second major gift opens new possibilities for WAIL

A second major equipment donation will help the Wisconsin Advanced Internet Laboratory (WAIL) on UW–Madison campus continue to distinguish itself as a first-of-its kind Internet research facility.

EMC Corporation, which specializes in providing networked information storage and information management software to organizations around the globe, is donating to WAIL high-end systems, software and services to test technology performance in a mock-Internet environment.

The donation comes on the heels of a large equipment donation from UW–Madison alumnus and Cisco Chairman John Morgridge. That donation, valued at about $3.5 million in equipment and support, helped form the foundation for the lab.

“Technology continues to be a driving force of change in the field of education and EMC recognizes the importance of providing students with cutting-edge tools to solve challenging and important IT issues,” says Don Swatik, vice president of EMC’s Solutions Group. “EMC is especially focused on supporting educational programs in today’s information-intensive economy and is delighted to assist in WAIL’s progress in this realm. This new facility will not only assist in advancing WAIL’s research efforts, but will allow students to gain firsthand technology expertise.”

WAIL has been designed and developed during the past 18 months by a team consisting of personnel from the Department of Computer Sciences and the Division of Information Technology on the UW–Madison campus, and Cisco. The facility allows researchers to recreate significant portions of the Internet in a lab setting, allowing them to test and evaluate new technologies in a controlled environment. It will enable researchers to address a variety of networking problems, including performance, management and security in a way that has not been possible in the past.

“This donation from EMC greatly expands the scope of WAIL’s research and experimentation capabilities,” says Paul Barford, WAIL director and assistant professor of computer science. “If I were to say that WAIL tests how technology will perform on the Internet in much the same way that a wind tunnel tests the performance of an airplane, then this new technology from EMC represents our first airplane.”

EMC has donated two Symmetrix Networked Storage Systems, which are capable of storing massive amounts of data safely and reliably. Symmetrix storage systems are high-end systems used by the world’s largest corporations and institutions to store data vital to the company and its customers.

Remzi Arpaci-Dusseau, an assistant professor of computer science, who is collaborating with Barford on the storage research initiative, says there is an increasing demand for such high-end systems. WAIL will use the equipment from EMC to study what problems large data systems encounter on the Internet, and search for ways to make them perform better and more securely.

“This equipment will allow us to investigate issues in distributed storage systems in a way that doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Arpaci-Dusseau says. “With the WAIL infrastructure, we take a quantum leap forward in our ability to understand how the storage systems of tomorrow will behave when deployed on the Internet.” One specific topic that Arpaci-Dusseau and Barford will be investigating is the use of high-end storage systems, such as those that EMC is donating, in wide-area collaborative computing environments.

“As more people rely on the Internet for their storage needs, more stress gets placed on the Internet to deliver data in a timely and secure manner,” Arpaci-Dusseau says. “Within WAIL, we can understand just how much stress the current infrastructure can take, and apply that knowledge in the design of the next generation of wide-area storage systems.”

In addition to research initiatives, the EMC donation gives students an opportunity to work with equipment that might not otherwise be available to them.

“One of the most important aspects of WAIL is that it gives students hands-on exposure to cutting edge technology,” Barford says. “Students are getting valuable experience building and configuring systems from the ground up. They would not be able to work with this collection of equipment at any other university.”

About EMC
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is a worldwide provider of information storage systems, software, networks and services, providing automated networked storage solutions for organizations across the globe.