Our musings on all things software, storage, and beyond.
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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
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Storage security is the cast-off stepchild of enterprise IT, often neglected and told to make do with hand-me-downs. And why not? The clothes still fit, right? They might have holes in the knees and fraying hems. They’re so threadbare that a light breeze blows right through them. But they fit. Like ancient clothes, the NFS […] READ MORE
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A very important lesson the year 2020 left us is that we need to be able to adapt. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced the entire world to shut down, everyone had to start doing things differently: work from home, study from home, entertainment at home, and many other things that were changing the world and […] READ MORE
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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