Category: Cloud Storage

Storage Life on the Edge

Tom Friend
Cloud to Edge infrastructures are rapidly growing.  It is expected that by 2025, up to 75% of all data generated will be created at the Edge.  However, Edge is a tricky word and you’ll get a different definition depending on who you ask. The physical edge could be in a factory, retail store, hospital, car, plane, cell tower level, or on your mobile device. The network edge could be a top-of-rack switch, server running host-based networking, or 5G base station. The Edge means putting servers, storage, and other devices outside the core data center and closer to both the data sources and the users of that data—both edge sources and edge users could be people or machines. Read More

Storage at the Edge Q&A

Alex McDonald
The ability to run analytics from the data center to the Edge, where the data is generated and lives creates new use cases for nearly every business. The impact of Edge computing on storage strategy was the topic at our recent SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) webcast, “Extending Storage to the Edge – How It Should Affect Your Storage Strategy.” If you missed the live event, it’s available on-demand. Our experts, Erin Farr, Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Storage CTO Innovation Team and Vincent Hsu, IBM Fellow, VP & CTO for Storage received several interesting questions during the live event. As promised, here are answers to them all. Q. What is the core principle of Edge computing technology? A. Edge computing is an industry trend rather than a standardized architecture, though there are organizations like LF EDGE with the objective of establishing an open, interoperable framework. Edge computing is generally about moving the workloads closer to where the data is generated and creating new innovative workloads due to that proximity. Common principles often include the ability to manage Edge devices at scale, using open technologies to create portable solutions, and of ultimately doing all of this with enterprise levels of security. Reference architectures exist for guidance, though implementations can vary greatly by industry vertical. Q. We all know connectivity is not guaranteed – how does that affect these different use cases? What are the HA implications? Read More

Genomics Compute, Storage & Data Management Q&A

Alex McDonald
Everyone knows data is growing at exponential rates. In fact, the numbers can be mind-numbing. That’s certainly the case when it comes to genomic data where 40,000PB of storage each year will be needed by 2025. Understanding, managing and storing this massive amount of data was the topic at our SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative webcast “Moving Genomics to the Cloud: Compute and Storage Considerations.” If you missed the live presentation, it’s available on-demand along with presentation slides. Our live audience asked many interesting questions during the webcast, but we did not have time to answer them all. As promised, our experts, Michael McManus, Torben Kling Petersen and Christopher Davidson have answered them all here. Q. Human genomes differ only by 1% or so, there’s an immediate 100x improvement in terms of data compression, 2743EB could become 27430PB, that’s 2.743M HDDs of 10TB each. We have ~200 countries for the 7.8B people, and each country could have 10 sequencing centers on average, each center would need a mere 1.4K HDDs, is there really a big challenge here? A. The problem is not that simple unfortunately. The location of genetic differences and the size of the genetic differences vary a lot across people. Still, there are compression methods like CRAM and PetaGene that can save a lot of space. Also consider all of the sequencing for rare disease, cancer, single cell sequencing, etc. plus sequencing for agricultural products. Q. What’s the best compression ratio for human genome data? Read More

Can Cloud Storage and Big Data Live Happily Ever After?

Chip Maurer
“Big Data” has pushed the storage envelope, creating a seemingly perfect relationship with Cloud Storage. But local storage is the third wheel in this relationship, and won’t go down easy. Can this marriage survive when Big Data is being pulled in two directions? Should Big Data pick one, or can the three of them live happily ever after? This will be the topic of discussion on October 21, 2021 at our live SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies webcast, “Cloud Storage and Big Data, A Marriage Made in the Clouds.” Join us as our SNIA experts will cover: Read More

Moving Genomics to the Cloud

Alex McDonald
The study of genomics in modern biology has revolutionized the discovery of medicines and the COVID pandemic response has quickened genetic research and driven the rapid development of vaccines. Genomics, however, requires a significant amount of compute power and data storage to make new discoveries possible. Making sure compute and storage are not a roadblock for genomics innovations will be the topic of discussion at the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative live webcast “Moving Genomics to the Cloud: Compute and Storage Considerations.” This session will feature expert viewpoints from both bioinformatics and technology perspectives with a focus on some of the compute and data storage challenges for genomics workflows. We will discuss: Read More

Extending Storage to the Edge

Jim Fister
Data gravity has pulled computing to the Edge and enabled significant advances in hybrid cloud deployments. The ability to run analytics from the datacenter to the Edge, where the data is generated and lives, also creates new use cases for nearly every industry and company. However, this movement of compute to the Edge is not the only pattern to have emerged. How might other use cases impact your storage strategy? That’s the topic of our next SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) live webcast on August 25, 2021 “Extending Storage to the Edge – How It Should Affect Your Storage Strategy” where our experts, Erin Farr, Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Storage CTO Innovation Team and Vincent Hsu, IBM Fellow, VP & CTO for Storage will join us for an interactive session that will cover:
  • Emerging patterns of data movement and the use cases that drive them
  • Cloud Bursting
  • Federated Learning across the Edge and Hybrid Cloud
  • Considerations for distributed cloud storage architectures to match these emerging patterns
Read More

Q&A: Cloud Analytics Takes Flight

Jim Fister
Recently, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) hosted a live webcast “Cloud Analytics Drives Airplanes-as-a-Service” with Ben Howard, CTO of KinectAir. It was a fascinating discussion on how analytics is making this new commercial airline business take off.  Ben has a history of innovation with multiple companies working on new flight technology, analytics, and artificial intelligence. In this session, he provided several insights from his experiences on how analytics can have a significant impact on every business. In the course of the conversation, we covered several questions, all of which were answered in the webcast. Here’s a preview of the questions along with some brief answers. Take an hour of your time to listen to the entire presentation, we think you’ll enjoy it. Q: What’s different about capturing data for Machine Learning? Read More

Continuous Delivery Software Development Q&A

Alex McDonald
What’s the best way to make a development team lean and agile? It was a question we explored at length during our SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative live webcast “Continuous Delivery: Cloud Software Development on Speed.” During this session, continuous delivery expert, Davis Frank, Co-creator of the Jasmine Test Framework, explained why product development teams are adopting a continuous delivery (CD) model. If you missed the live event, you can watch it on-demand here. The webcast audience was highly engaged with this topic and asked some interesting questions. Here are Davis Frank’s answers: Q.  What are a few simple tests you can use to determine your team’s capability to deliver CD? Read More

Continuous Delivery: Cloud Software Development on Speed

Alex McDonald
It happens with more frequency these days. Two companies merge, and the IT departments breathe a small sigh of relief as they learn that they both use the same infrastructure software, though one is on-premises and one is in the cloud. Their relief slowly dissolves, as they discover that the cloud-provisioned workers are using features in the software that have yet to be integrated into the on-prem version. Now both have to adapt and it seems that no one is happy. So, what’s the best way to get these versions in sync? A Continuous Delivery model is increasingly being adopted to get software development on a pace to keep up with business demands. The Continuous Delivery model results in a development organization that looks much like current manufacturing processes with effective workers, modern machines, and a just-in-time inventory. Even large software companies are starting to embrace this cloud delivery methodology to create a continuous stream of new revisions. Read More

Cloud Analytics Drives Airplanes-as-a-Service Business

Jim Fister
On-demand flying through an app sounds like something for only the rich and famous, yet the use of cloud analytics is making flexible flying a reality at start-up airline, KinectAir.  On April 7, 2021, The CTO of KinectAir, Ben Howard, will join the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) for a fascinating discussion on first-hand experiences of leveraging cloud analytics methods to bring new business models to life that are competitive and profitable. And since start-up companies may not have legacy data and analytics to consider, we’ll also explore what established businesses using traditional analytics methods can learn from this use case. Join us on April 7th for our live webcast “Adapting Cloud Analytics for Practical Business Use” for views from both start-up and established companies on how to revisit the analytics decision process with a discussion on: Read More