The RAID laboratory was established in 1986 for conducting research in distributed database systems. The RAID System has been operational since the summer of 1987. In addition several systems: O-RAID (Object), P-RAID (Parallel), Mini-RAID, MM-RAID (Multimedia) and PUSH (OS/DBMS) are available. Other software developed and available in the lab are WANCE (Wide Area Network Communication Emulation) tool, several benchmarks for experiments, and simulated distributed system. Recently, there has been research conducted on multimedia systems leading to the development of a video-conferencing system, a video-on-demand system, a color-based image indexing system and a color-based tool to determine quality of an image. The software developed at the RAID lab consists of over 100,000 lines of code written in the C Programming language that executes on the UNIX operating system. The RAID laboratory has provided an environment for testing algorithms, conducting experiments, and implementing new ideas.