Sandeep Uttamchandani

Dr. Sandeep Uttamchandani
650 Harry Road, San Jose, USA

sandeepu AT us DOT ibm DOT com


"If you can dream it, you can do it" -- Walt Disney

About Me

I am a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center. I belong to the Storage Systems Research Group, and have been involved with a wide variety of projects related with storage performance evaluation, distributed file systems, policy-based storage management, automated disaster recovery planning, deployment and validation, power management.

I joined IBM Research in 2001 after completing my Masters from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC). I continued making progress on my PhD, while working full-time. I graduated in 2005 with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UIUC. My thesis topic was "A Model-based Approach for Autonomic Storage Management." I learnt a lot from my PhD committee members: Prof. Gul Agha (Distributed Systems), Dr. Jai Menon (IBM Fellow in Storage Systems), Prof. Yuanyuan Zhou(Systems), Prof. Dan Roth (Machine Learning), Dr. Carolyn Talcott(Formal Methods Research at Stanford Research Institute).

Key Projects

My research problems are motivated by issues in real-world storage and data management. I typically approach problem solving from two directions: a research vision to identify the key "unexplored" modules that leads to papers and patents, and a grounded "simple" but not "simplistic" version of the problem that can be implemented, evaluated and integrated with existing IBM product offerings in the short-term.

I am currently involved in several projects playing different roles -- a lead, a team member, an individual innovator, or as a mentor to help with the vision and focus of the project:

• Leader for the innovation, implementation, and product technology transfer of a systems management framework to simplify the pain-point of disaster recovery planning, deployment, validation and testing in enterprise environments
• Team member for design and implementation of Adaptive Data Deduplication framework
• Team member for exploring interaction between databases and evolving storage architectures
• Mentor for power-based optimization in next generation data centers
• An innovator for Storage as a Service
• Innovator and leader for SMART: A framework that applies data mining techniques to simplify the current administrative tasks for provisioning, problem determination, impact analysis, power management, chargeback trends and optimization

I have described here two key projects that I helped create and currently driving the concepts, design, implementation and evaluation. If you are interested in collaborating or learning more about the other projects listed above, please send me a mail.

I am currently focusing in the domain of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery. I lead a team of researchers from Almaden and India lab in developing an End-to-end (server-storage-network) Disaster Recovery Planning, Deployment, Validation, and Failover Orchestration Framework. {Watch this space:: Additional details coming soon!}

I envisioned and continue to develop the next-generation storage management systems framework SMART . SMART is an acronym for Storage Management Analytics and Reasoning Technology. It consists of a collection of projects that aim to automate the Monitor, Analyze, Plan, Execute Loop in Enterprise storage systems:

·          Autonomic creation and evolution of performance models of physical storage devices; modeling uses an innovative combination of black-box and white-box techniques.

·          Autonomic abnormality detection and diagnosis - Performance monitoring and clustering to determine whether performance is in line with expectations given the workload or whether it indicates a problem somewhere in the system; additionally, snapshots of the system behavior are correlated with system log events to provide top-K events for the administrator to diagnose a performance problem

·          Multi-action Correction Action Scheduler -- A model-based optimization engine that selects one or more type of corrective actions to solve a performance SLO; the optimization is a first-of-a-kind that takes into account business constraints such as budget, size of optimization window, and outputs a schedule of short-term, long-term, and provisioning actions

Publications

FAST09	DiaDS: Addressing the "My-Problem-or-Yours" Syndrome with Integrated SAN and Database Diagnosis. Shivnath Babu, Nedyalko Borisov, Sandeep Uttamchandani, Ramani Routray, Aameek Singh. To appear in 7th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '09) , 2009
CIDR09	Why did my query slowdown? Nedyalko Borisov, Sandeep Uttamchandani, Ramani Routray, Aameek Singh. To appear in Fourth Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems (CIDR ‘09), 2009
MASCOTS08	Evaluating the Effectiveness of Information Extraction in Real-World Storage Management. Aameek Singh, Sandeep Uttamchandani, Yin Wang. In Proceedings for 16th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS), 2008.
NOMS08	ChargeView: An Integrated Tool for Implementing Chargeback in IT Systems. Sandip Agarwala, Ramani Routray, Sandeep Uttamchandani. In Proceedings for IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS’08), Brazil, 2008
MIDDLEWARE08	Demystifying data deduplication. NagaPramod Mandagere, Pin Zhou, Mark A. Smith, Sandeep Uttamchandani. In Proceedings for 9th International Middleware Conference (MIDDLEWARE’08) [Industrial track], 2008
IBM Journal08	Evolution of storage management: Transforming raw data into information. IBM Journal of Research and Development Vol-52(4,5), 2008.
IBM Journal08	Automated planners for storage provisioning and disaster recovery. IBM Journal of Research and Development Vol-52(4,5), 2008.
SCC07	BRAHMA: Planning Tool for Providing Storage Management as a Service. Sandeep Uttamchandani, Kaladhar Voruganti, Ramani Routray, Li Yin, Aameek Singh, Benji Yolken, IEEE Int'l Conference on Services Computing (SCC) 2007.
MASCOTS06	An Empirical Exploration of Black-Box Performance Models for Storage Systems. Li Yin, Sandeep Uttamchandani, Randy Katz. In Proceedings for 14th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems (MASCOTS), 2006.
Usenix06	SMART: An Integrated Multi-Action Advisor for Storage Systems. Li Yin, Sandeep Uttamchandani, Madhukar Korupolu, Kaladhar Voruganti, Randy H. Katz. In Proceedings of the 2006 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX’06), Boston, USA, 2006.
ICDCS06	Genesis: A Scalable Self-Evolving Performance Management Framework for Storage Systems. Kristal Pollack, Sandeep Uttamchandani. In Proceedings of 2006 International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems , Lisboa, Portugal, July 2006
ICAC05	PULSTORE.: Automated Storage Management with QoS Guarantee. Lin Qiao, Balakrishna R. Iyer, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi, Sandeep Uttamchandani. In Second International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC’05), 2005
Usenix05	Chameleon: a self-evolving, fully-adaptive resource arbitrator for storage systems. Sandeep Uttamchandani, Li Yin, Guillermo Alvarez, John Palmer, Gul Agha. In Proceedings for USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX’05), Anaheim, CA, April , 2005.
MSST05	STORAGEDB: Enhancing the Storage Sub-System with DBMS Functionalities. Lin Qiao, Balakrishna R. Iyer, Divyakant Agrawal, Amr El Abbadi, Sandeep Uttamchandani. In Proceedings for 22nd IEEE Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSST’05), 2005.
POLICY05	AutoLoop: automated action selection in the "observe-analyze-act" loop for storage systems. Li Yin, Sandeep Uttamchandani, John Palmer, Randy Katz. In Proceedings for 6th IEEE International Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks (POLICY'05), 2005.
IM05	MonitorMining: Creating Domain Knowledge for System Automation Using a Gray-box Approach. Sandeep Uttamchandani, Xiaoxin Yin, John Palmer, Gul Agha. In Proceedings for Ninth IFIP/IEEE International Symposium on Integrated Network Management, Nice, France, May, 2005.
FAST04	Polus: Growing Storage QoS Management beyond a "4-year Old Kid." Sandeep Uttamchandani,, Kaladhar Voruganti, Sudarshan M. Srinivasan, John Palmer, David Pease. In Proceedings for 3rd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '04) , 2004.
POLICY04	DecisionQoS: an adaptive, self-evolving QoS arbitration module for storage systems. Sandeep Uttamchandani, Guillermo Alvarez, Gul Agha. In Proceedings for 5th IEEE International Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks (POLICY'04), 2004.
FAST03	Storage Over IP: When Does Hardware Support Help? Prasenjit Sarkar, Sandeep Uttamchandani, Kaladhar Voruganti. In Proceedings for 2nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST '03) , 2003.
DSOM’03	Eos: An Approach of Using Behavior Implications for Policy-based Self-management. Sandeep Uttamchandani, Carolyn Talcott, David Pease. In Proceedings for 14th IFIP/IEEE International Workshop on Distributed Systems: Operations & Management (DSOM’03), 2003

 

 

Patents

I currently have 34 patent applications on various topics in storage ranging from hardware offloading to advanced planning algorithms in systems management.

 

Awards and Recognition

·          Research Division Award for Contributions of Storage Management and Analytics to Tivoli’s TPC product, 2008

·          Fourth patent plateau award, 2007

·          Nominated as the Storage PIC Chair for IBM Almaden, 2007

·          Publication awards in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008 for technical papers in key systems conferences

·          Nominated as the Distinguished Speaker Series Chair at IBM Almaden, 2006

·          Third patent plateau award, 2006

·          Bravo award in 2005 and IBM's SAN Filesystem (SAN.FS) product enhancements

·          Second patent plateau award, 2005

·          Bravo award in 2003 for contributions to IBM's iSCSI product

·          First patent plateau award, 2003

 

Mentoring and PhD Committee Member

I am currently on the PhD committee of two students:

·          Pramod Mandagere from University of Minnesota working with Prof. David Du

·          Songyun Duan from Duke University working with Prof. Shivnath Babu

I am also currently mentoring summer interns as well as new full-time researchers who have recently joined the Storage Group at Almaden.

External University Collaborations

Collaborating with universities is key for IBM. We are always interested in building new collaborations -- if you feel your research is relevant to our domain, please drop me a line. I built the research collaborations with the following:

·          Prof. Randy Katz at University of California at Berkeley

·          Prof. Shivnath Babu at Duke University

·          Prof. Nick Bambos at Stanford University

I am currently serving on the IBM faculty awards selection committee.

Educational Qualification

Doctorate of Philosophy (Computer Science)

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), 2005 (Completed while working full-time)

Master of Science (Computer Science)

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), 2001