About DISC

Role of DISC

The University of Minnesota’s Digital Technology Center Intelligent Storage Consortium (DISC), is one of the premier storage research centers in the country. The interdisciplinary center draws from many faculty and students mainly from Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. The DISC Consortium, through affiliates and members, brings together University of Minnesota researchers and representatives of the storage and networking industry and public sector agencies — all of whom share an interest in the future of intelligent storage.

DISC provides a focal point to conduct advanced research and development of common interest to the Storage Industry. It will also provide a direct connection with industry wide architecture and standards type groups that are working to define common strategic directions for intelligent storage.

Mission of DISC

Initially DISC has focused on the research and development issues of Intelligent (object-based) Storage Systems, including architectures that implement them and applications that use them. The unique approach at DISC attempts to balance academic issues and real world problems that provides members with a more complete and significant outcome which tries to integrate:

• Applications that need / use storage
• Emerging Storage Architectures
• Emerging Storage Technologies — software and hardware
• Business cases built on market trends, product directions, adoption rates

Over time, DISC members will take ownership of intellectual property created by DISC and will support the ongoing delivery on advanced technology into the open source community of R&D for storage systems.