Our musings on all things software, storage, and beyond.
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“When high-performance computing (HPC) began in the 1990s, hardware platforms were proprietary and limited in their reliability, which wasn’t much of a problem, because workloads were relatively small. Nearly thirty years later, workloads have grown potentially to hundreds of petabytes, and early HPC cluster architecture has failed to scale effectively, especially on reliability. Google solved […] READ MORE
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Entertainment studios supply their customers with some of the most valuable data in the world. It falls to those customers to protect that data because, all too often, they only get one copy when they license it. From archiving to remastering, source files can cost millions of dollars to maintain. Keeping a top-fidelity, ultra-high-resolution licensed […] READ MORE
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If you search YouTube for “fully autonomous vehicles,” you’d swear the long-promised future of self-driving cars, a la Total Recall or Batman, was already here. Tesla proclaims we are seeing “the beginning of the end for human-driven cars.” Google-owned Waymo released a video showing that “fully autonomous driving technology is here.” Surely, after so many […] READ MORE
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Network-attached storage (NAS) consolidation is the process of reducing the amount of NAS systems used in an environment to a unified system that behaves like a virtual system. NAS consolidation gives you the ability to provide a cloud-like experience to users while eliminating a lot of limitations that single NAS systems have. To learn more […] READ MORE
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In our previous blog piece, “It’s a Trap! – The True Cost of the Cloud,” we referenced an Andreesen Horowitz article called “The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox.” This recent gem indulges in more than a little heresy. It discusses Dropbox’s repatriation of user data from third-party cloud resources to in-house storage infrastructure […] READ MORE
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Founded in 1955 as merely an academic discipline, artificial intelligence (AI) has grown to become a wide-ranging branch of computer science concerned with building smart machines capable of performing tasks that typically require human intelligence. Ideally, AI should have the ability to rationalize and take actions that have the best chance of achieving a specific […] READ MORE
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We recently wrote about Hadoop’s HDFS and how it was once mighty and instrumental in big data, but today the file system’s flaws leave it buckling under modern analytics and AI workloads. Anyone working in those spaces needs to be aware of these disadvantages. But what about the rest of the enterprise storage market? For […] READ MORE
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You would never send a kid to college with a toddler bed. They’ve outgrown it, right? The Lightning McQueen bed that fit 15 years ago obviously no longer suits present needs. Why, then, wouldn’t an enterprise reach the same conclusion about its data storage? What is HDFS? Apache’s Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) and its […] READ MORE
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How does the Native Quobyte HDFS Driver work? The driver implements the HDFS API, which means that it has the same API as HDFS but replaces it completely. Your big data applications, such as Hadoop, Spark or Hive, talk to Quobyte instead of HDFS, but won’t notice the difference. This also means that you won’t […] READ MORE
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Should I run my storage on the same nodes that I use as Hadoop workers, or should I have dedicated storage servers and worker nodes that only do compute? This question has been puzzling data administrators since Hadoop first became popular in the late 2000s. Even if you don’t use Hadoop but use other big […] READ MORE