Our musings on all things software, storage, and beyond.
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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? Apache’s Hadoop distributed file system (HDFS) and its associated MapReduce engine […] 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
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If you hear the term, “hot spares”, run! No, really. Recently, someone asked me whether our system requires hot spares, and after a moment of shock and confusion I couldn’t resist but answer with a Star Wars quote: “Now there’s a term I’ve not heard in a long time.” Turns out that there are newer […] READ MORE
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Don’t get me wrong. The cloud is amazing. It has made it so much easier to start new data projects, experiment with machine learning, and quickly move storage infrastructures into production. The flexibility alone has provided businesses with the much-needed resources for short-term, immediate projects (like a spike in workloads) that on-prem often just can’t […] READ MORE
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Getting a lot of files from A to B is still not an easy task. While rsync is versatile it’s not the fastest and parallelizing rsync is no fun. Quobyte comes with two mechanisms to make data migrations easy. The command line tool qcopy used to move data onto a Quobyte cluster from any (Linux) […] READ MORE