rtegrity™, a company founded in 2023, focuses on delivering Data Agility and Resilience through consultancy, training, research and development services. Our innovative team has a strong background in Cloud Native design, with decades of experience building enterprise storage solutions and a proven track record implementing high-quality solutions to real-world ‘big picture’ problems.
Our extensive experience includes:
Software Defined Storage
Co-Founder, Chief Scientist and Chief Architect at DataCore Software, pioneering Software Defined Storage and delivering highly available, highly performant storage solutions for 25 years. Over 10,000 installations of SANsymphony, a polled, high-performance, multi-threaded storage stack running in the Windows kernel.
Innovated and lead the development of many key concepts including thin provisioning, continuous data protection, client-side caching, random write acceleration and node-independent data services. Designed auto-tiering to dynamically redistribute block based data between tiers of storage based on historical usage patterns to improve performance and reduce cost.
Lead the development of DataCore’s Parallel I/O technology to deliver world record SPC-1 results on commodity hardware, using innovative, highly concurrent, multi-core algorithms for ultra-low latency I/O.
Key technical contributions to adaptive caching, low latency polling, performance tuning, virtual tape, client-side mirroring, I/O accelerator, SCSI-3 Persistent Reserve and the storage stack kernel infrastructure. Developed the key test program used to ensure and diagnose data integrity in the storage stack under heavy load.
Inventor of the following patents:
US 9946606B1 – Stream architecture for data representation
US 9344235B1 – Network managed volumes (thin provisioning)
US 10740028 – LRU Buffer Management
US 10599477B2 – Command List Processing
US 10409640B1 – Data Request Scheduling
US 10318354B1 – Command List Processing
US 10013283B1 – Data Request Scheduling
Cloud Native and Edge
Technical lead for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Storage Technical Advisory Group (TAG) and public speaker on architecting storage for a Cloud Native world, e.g. Cloud Native Storage, Disaggregated Container Attached Storage.
Technical lead for DataCore’s involvement in OpenEBS Mayastor, recently adopted by Microsoft as the basis for Azure Container Storage. Delivered ephemeral infrastructure initiatives using Packer, Terraform, Vagrant and Ansible.
Inventor of the following patent:
US 11029855 – Containerized Storage Stream Microservice
Security
Public speaker on data security in a multi-tenanted containerised environment (Persistent Data for Secured Containers).
Participant in the Digital Security by Design Technology Access Program giving access to the potentially game-changing CHERI (Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions) prototype cybersecurity technology from the University of Cambridge and Arm. Ported the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) to the Arm Morello research platform to deliver capability verified security within the storage stack.
Designed a system for secure data handling across a trust domain in a multi-tenanted environment using a containerised storage stack:
US 10877750 – Containerised Storage Microservice with Direct Connection to Requesting Application Container
Distributed Systems
Design of multi-node distributed systems, including:
- DataCore SANsymphony, a loosely coupled multi-node distributed storage system.
- OpenEBS Mayastor, a scalable multi-node system built on ephemeral infrastructure.
- Encore DASD, a tightly coupled system with a shared coherent cache based around a reflective memory subsystem.
- Encore IFS, a scalable distributed file system with shared VME bus memory.
- Distributed filesystem with high-speed serial connection to provide coherency.
Inventor of the following patents:
US 10498802 – Multi-node Data Storage Management
US 10003636B1 – Multi-node Data Store management
Networking
Storage Area Networks and their associated protocols, including Fibre Channel, SCSI, SAS, SATA, Ethernet, TCP/IP, iSCSI, NVMe, and NVMe over Fabrics, as well as IBM DASD protocols over BMC and ESCON.
Inventor of patents for SCSI over TCP/IP:
US 7627643B1 – SCSI Tunnelling Protocol via TCP/IP
US 7177912 – SCSI Transport Protocol via TCP/IP
Systems Engineering
Computing hardware and software, including storage architectures, I/O protocols and performance, cloud native design, virtualisation, distributed systems, system performance, real-time systems, scheduling, hardware controllers, firmware and highly parallel systems.
Kernel development on Windows, Unix, and FreeBSD. In particular, implemented asynchronous real-time pre-emption in the Unix kernel and lightweight POSIX kernel threads. Kernel performance improvements, including locking algorithms, system call overheads, buffer cache handling, file system code and profiling tools. Crash dump analysis and problem resolution.
Embedded and low-level development, including porting, board bring up, trap handling and performance improvement of software, hardware and firmware.
Custom hardware design as required.
rtegrity™ is working with Digital Security by Design on innovative ways to create a more resilient and secure foundation for a safer future.
