Harriet Coverston

Harriet Coverston is an American computer scientist and software developer focused on large-scale secondary storage environments, who has previously participated to various kernel developments in HPC systems. ^[1] Harriet is an expert in large scale archiving systems, having participated to several large projects and product developments.

Career

She started her career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1967 working on CDC 7600 Livermore Timesharing System ^{[2] [3]} within a team of 5 people. She stayed until 1974 and then moved to Control Data Corporation for 12 years to collaborate on the Cyber 205 Operating System and CDCNET.

In January 1986, she co-founded LSC (Large Scale Configurations) where she was vice-president of technology more than 15 years. LSC was a ISV developing SAM-QFS and QFS, two software dedicated to manage cold and archived data. QFS is a high performance file system and SAM is advanced storage management.

In 2001, Sun Microsystems acquired LSC and Harriet Coverston became distinguished engineer at Sun, a position she occupied until 2010. Oracle closed the acquisition of Sun early 2010. ^[4]

She co-founded Versity in March 2011 with Bruce Gilpin and acts as its CTO since its inception. ^[5] Versity is a storage ISV developer of archiving software. ^{[6] [7] [8]} The company developed ScoutFS, ^[9] a clustered disk file system, coupled with its archiving manager companion ScoutAM and the team also has added a S3 gateway. ^[10]

Harriet Coverston, CTO and co-founder, Versity Software

In August 2024, she received the SuperWomen of FMS Leadership Award ^{[11] [12]} at the annual Future of Memory and Storage conference in Santa Clara, CA, for all her contributions during her long active career in data archiving domain.

Education

Harriet Coverston received a BA in Mathematics from Florida State University.^{[ citation needed ]}

Patents

Harriet participates and co-owns 15 patents: ^[13]

• File archiving system and method ^[14]
• Delegation in a file system with distributed components ^[15]
• File system with distributed components ^[16]
• Method and system for collective file access using an mmap (memory-mapped file) ^{[17] [18]}
• Dynamic routing of I/O requests in a multi-tier storage environment ^[19]
• Dynamic data migration in a multi-tier storage system ^[20]
• File archiving system and method ^[21]
• Delegation in a file system with distributed components ^[22]
• File system with distributed components ^[23]
• Method, system, and program for providing data to an application program from a file in a file system ^[24]
• Method, system, and program for managing files in a file system ^[25]
• Archiving file system for data servers in a distributed network environment ^[26]
• Method and apparatus for insuring recovery of file control information for secondary storage systems ^[27]
• Method and apparatus for file storage allocation for secondary storage using large and small file blocks ^[28]

References

1. "Short bio on Sandia Labs Laboratories".
2. "Livermore time-sharing system for the CDC 7600 (DBLP)".
3. Sutherland, George G.; Coverston, Harriet G.; Dubois, Pierre J.; Emery, Donald R.; Kent, Douglas A.; Lund, Paul E.; Powles, George H.; Storch, F. David; Tennant, Lee O.; von Buskirk, Donald L. (1971). "Livermore time-sharing system for the CDC 7600 (AMC)". ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review. 5 (2–3): 6–26. doi:10.1145/1232916.1232917.
4. "The end of Oracle HSM".
5. StorageNewsletter (May 9, 2011). "Harriet Coverston, co-founder and CTO of Versity".
6. Chris Mellor (June 21, 2016). "New storage upstart Versity offers S3 object storage interface".
7. Chris Mellor (April 9, 2014). "Cray flogs 1PB of TASty storage to German übercomputing boffins, leaves them in tiers".
8. Chris Mellor (November 6, 2013). "Supercomputer-maker Cray offers cold storage to hungry Big Data boys".
9. Philippe Nicolas (September 13, 2018). "Versity unveils new file system".
10. Philippe Nicolas (June 15, 2013). "Versity unveils its S3 gateway".
11. "SuperWomen of FMS Leadership Award". August 7, 2024.
12. "Harriet Coverston Honored by FMS as 2024 SuperWomen". July 23, 2024.
13. "Patents by Inventor Harriet G. Coverston".
14. "File archiving system and method". April 21, 2015.
15. "Delegation in a file system with distributed components". September 6, 2011.
16. "File system with distributed components". April 24, 2011.
17. "Method and system for collective file ac cess using an mmap (memory-mapped file)". January 12, 2010.
18. "Method and system for collective file ac cess using an mmap (memory-mapped file)". May 22, 2008.
19. "Dynamic routing of I/O requests in a multi-tier storage environment". May 26, 2009.
20. "Dynamic data migration in a multi-tier storage system". May 26, 2009.
21. "File archiving system and method". July 3, 2008.
22. "Delegation in a file system with distributed components". March 13, 2008.
23. "File system with distributed components". February 28, 2008.
24. "Method, system, and program for providing data to an application program from a file in a file system". January 2, 2003.
25. "Method, system, and program for managing files in a file system". January 2, 2003.
26. "Archiving file system for data servers in a distributed network environment". June 9, 1998.
27. "Method and apparatus for insuring recovery of file control information for secondary storage systems". April 2, 1996.
28. "Method and apparatus for file storage allocation for secondary storage using large and small file blocks". September 26, 1995.