Well Deserved, Harriet Coverston Earns FMS: The Future of Memory and Storage's SuperWomen of FMS Leadership Award for 2024

July 24, 2024

News

Harriet Coverston has contributed significantly to file systems and archival storage systems, showing that high-performance archiving and file systems can be integrated on a large scale. She developed the Quick File System (QFS), which led to the creation of SAM-QFS, the first multi-node clustered file system that incorporated archiving to meet the high-performance scaling requirements of large real-time streaming data systems.

Coverston's contributions and enhancements brought this model to market, influencing many products that are still actively developed and utilized at large-scale sites globally. This technology has shaped archival systems within scientific and research communities. In her 70s, she remains active in the community, building technology for efficient scale-out archives that span tape, S3, and cloud storage solutions.

Raised on a farm in the Florida panhandle, Coverston earned a math degree from Florida State University. She spent her senior year studying abroad and volunteering during the 1966 flood of the Arno, becoming one of the celebrated “mud angels” who saved invaluable artworks in Florence. She entered the tech industry as a programmer, starting her career working on the CDC 7600 Livermore Timesharing System at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

In the 1970s, she joined Control Data Corporation, contributing to the development of the Cyber 205 Operating System and CDCNET. She then co-founded LSC, serving as vice president of technology, where she created SAM-FS and SAM-QFS for managing cold and archived data. Sun Microsystems acquired LSC in 2001 due to its critical infrastructure work for a major government customer, and she became a distinguished engineer at Sun until 2010. In 2011, she co-founded Versity with Bruce Gilpin, where she has been the CTO, focusing on archiving software.