Our musings on all things software, storage, and beyond.
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Over the last five years, massive scale-out workloads have arrived in the enterprise. Driven by new big data analytics technologies like Hadoop or Spark, or more recently machine learning (ML) and AI, enterprises today have to deal with unprecedented amounts of data. In some domains, the data growth has been driven by hardware innovations such […] READ MORE
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Scale-out workloads used to be the domain of high-performance computing (HPC). However, over the past couple of years scale-out workloads have arrived in the enterprise with applications like machine learning or big data/analytics. Enterprise environments, and increasingly HPC users, require 24/7 availability of the storage system. What is BeeGFS? BeeGFS is an open-source, parallel file […] READ MORE
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New holes emerge as enterprises embrace containers Increasingly, corporations are in the data business, they collect more of it, they rely on it to make key decisions, and it essentially drives the business. However, they are not good at protecting it. Why? Most data analytic applications are built on modern architectures, like containers and […] READ MORE
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Kubernetes, the popular container management system, offers enterprises many benefits: agility, scalability, faster development, and management. Consequently, the open source orchestration software has quickly been gaining traction. One ripple effect is that many enterprise storage systems are struggling to keep pace with its growth. As a result, enterprises need to look at their storage solutions […] READ MORE
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In a recent post, we discussed the technological advances happening around protein folding, crystallography, atomic-resolution visualization, and modeling. Success in this space carries the promise of life sciences labs being able to study existing, unmapped proteins with unprecedented speed, which in turn assists new predictive modeling techniques. Collectively, these advances may lead to cures to […] READ MORE
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Some readers may recall the rise and spread of “mad cow disease” in the early 1990s, more accurately known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE). With symptoms that resembled dementia and wasting, the fatal disease proved transmissible to humans via ingestion of contaminated tissue and resulted in millions of cows being slaughtered to protect international food […] READ MORE
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To understand the basic difference between “scale-up” and “scale-out” technologies, think of residential housing. You’ve got a lot of people who need shelter and minimal space constraints. A scale-up approach would be to make one building as tall as possible. However, the higher you build, the more physics and cost come into play. Soon, the […] READ MORE
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Summary: Detailed, data-driven analysis of plankton can yield remarkable insights into the state of oceanic health and the world’s food chain. Collecting and crunching that data relies on efforts by Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center and the OSU Center for Quantitative Life Sciences. Executing this ongoing big data project requires very powerful IT […] READ MORE
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When designing storage solutions for your users, you may come across one challenge: Storage isolation. How do you ensure user A is not seeing or deleting data from user B? There are two strategies: First, you can build physically separated customer environments, including storage targets. And second, you can rely on a logical layer of […] READ MORE
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When I wrote my Master’s thesis on 3D protein structure alignment 15 years ago, predicting the folding of a protein was a very difficult problem. Fast forward 15 years and it still is a difficult problem… and far from solved. What changed is that with CryoEM, discovering the 3D structure of a molecule, like a […] READ MORE