by dave on February 13, 2009
One of the current “hot” topics within the IT industry these days is the concept of cloud computing. While there is a level of ambiguity around what cloud computing actually is, there is a definite trend towards looking at what these cloud services and storage can do for the commercial and enterprise.
Private Cloud Challenges
In a previous posting, I talked about the concept of a common cloud file system or cFS. Some folks responded on Twitter that perhaps IBM‘s GPFS filesystem (as a part of their SOFS strategy) could indeed fulfill that role for the cloud. As an additional twist, PaaS “connectors” such as SnapLogic, et. al. that seek to tie front-end processes or applications to underlying cloud services could simply provide a API hook to entities like Nirvanix, GoGrid, Amazon S3, etc. for handling discrete storage functions (with the obvious implications of data access/protection SLAs being separate and distinct from the middleware providers). The provision for this changes when you start talking about privatizing the cloud.
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by dave on February 11, 2009
Earlier this morning, Scott Lowe posed the following question: What if hypervisors shared a file system? The concept here is that most hypervisors (notably VMware and [soon] Hyper-V) have a clustered file system that is used to extend the capabilities of a group of hypervisors into such things as dynamic resource sharing, failover/failback, HA, etc. The natural extention of this, when looked at from a longitudinal viewpoint, is extending the same basic model into the cloud.
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by dave on January 19, 2009
In previous Cloud Optimized Storage Solution articles, I’ve discussed the content being stored, the method of storage, as well as principles derived from data tiering. Today, I want to jump ahead a bit and discuss how neural networks and heuristics can impact the processing of object and file data for the cloud.
One of the more recent advancements within computing has been the application of heuristics and neural networking. Heuristics is defined as being “…an educational method in which learning takes place through discoveries that result from investigations…“ While heuristics has historically been used in such products like anti-virus software, it provides an incredible wealth of capability and technology for the COSS solution. Similarly, neural networks provide capacitive understanding of processing layers and optimizations that learn patterns based on underlying statistical data. How do these two technologies apply to COSS?
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