SNIA on Cloud Storage

5G, Edge, and Industry 4.0 Q&A

March 22, 2022March 22, 2022 Alex McDonald Leave a comment

The confluence of 5G networks, AI and machine learning, industrial IoT, and edge computing are driving the fourth industrial revolution – Industry 4.0. The impact of the industrial edge and how it is being transformed were among the topics at our SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) webcast “5G Industrial Private Network and Edge Data Pipelines.” If you missed it, you can view it on-demand along with the presentation slides in the SNIA Educational Library. In this blog, we are sharing and clarifying answers to some of the intriguing questions from the live event.

Q. What are some of the key challenges to support the agility and flexibility requirements of Industry 4.0?

A. The fourth industrial revolution aka Industry 4.0 aspires to fundamentally transform the flexibility, versatility and productivity of future smart factories. Key attributes of this vision include complex workloads to enable remote autonomous operation, which involves autonomous mobile robots and machines, augmented reality aided connected workers, wireless sensors, actuators and remote supervisory control systems, as shown in the diagram below. Machines in smart factories will no longer be stationary. To enable quick response to supply demand changes and enable mass customization (“batch size of one”), factory lines need to be quickly reconfigurable and need machines to move within a certain range. These AI-based, mobile autonomous robots and machines require high data through-put wireless networks and highly reliable sub-second latency for machine-to-machine control communications.

Understanding How Data Privacy, Data Governance, and Data Security Differ

March 2, 2022March 2, 2022 Michael Hoard Leave a comment

Ever wonder what’s the difference between data privacy, data governance and data security? All of these terms are frequently (and mistakenly) used interchangeably. They are indeed related, particularly when it comes to keeping data in the cloud protected, private and secure, but the definitions and mechanics of executing on each are all quite different.

Join us on March 30, 2022 for another SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) “15 Minutes in the Cloud” session for an overview of what each of these terms means, how and where they intersect, and why each one demands adequate attention or you risk threatening the overall security of your data.

Scaling Storage to New Heights

February 22, 2022February 22, 2022 Alex McDonald Leave a comment

Earlier this month, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) presented a live webcast called “High Performance Storage at Exascale” where our HPC experts, Glyn Bowden, Torben Kling Petersen and Michael Hennecke talked about processing and storing data in shockingly huge numbers. The session raises some interesting points on how scale is quickly being redefined and what was cost compute prohibitive a few years ago for most, may be in reach for all sooner than expected.

Q. Is HPC a rich man’s game? The scale appears to have increased dramatically over the last few years. Is the cost increasing to the point where this is only for wealthy organizations or has the cost decreased to the point where small to medium-sized enterprises might be able to indulge in HPC activities?

Multi-cloud Use Has Become the Norm

February 15, 2022February 28, 2022 Alex McDonald Leave a comment

Multiple clouds within an organization have become the norm. This strategy enables organizations to reduce risk and dependence on a single cloud platform. The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) discussed this topic at length at our live webcast last month Why Use Multiple Clouds?

We polled our webcast attendees on their use of multiple clouds and here’s what we learned about the cloud platforms that comprise their multi-cloud environments:

A Q&A on Big Data in the Cloud

December 8, 2021December 8, 2021 Chip Maurer Leave a comment

The title of our recent live SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies webcast, â€œCloud Storage and Big Data, A Marriage Made in the Cloudsâ€ might lead you to believe we were producing a new reality show, but of course, that was not the case. This webcast with SNIA experts, Chip Maurer, Vincent Hsu and Andy Longworth examined modernization challenges related to Big Data and key considerations for storing Big Data as workloads evolve. Our audience asked great questions during the live event. As promised, here are our expertsâ€™ answers.

Q: Is there much movement with Open Source Object Storage solutions, such as OpenStack suite – Swift, etc?

A. Yes, there is no shortage of Open Source storage solutions. The decision depends upon your organizationâ€™s expertise, reliability, cost, application availability and location, and your overall storage strategy.

Q. What drives organizations to modernize?

Why Use Multiple Clouds?

November 22, 2021November 22, 2021 Alex McDonald Leave a comment

As storing data in the cloud has become ubiquitous and mature, many organizations have adopted a multi-cloud strategy. Eliminating dependence on a single cloud platform is quite a compelling case with benefits of increased reliability, availability, performance, and the avoidance of vendor lock-in and/or specific vendor vulnerabilities to name a few. In short, spanning multiple clouds ensures a business does not have all its eggs (i.e. data) in one basket.

But multi-cloud environments are not without challenges. Taking advantage of the benefits without increasing complexity requires a strategy that ensures applications are not tightly coupled to cloud-specific technologies. Supporting a storage abstraction layer that insulates the application from the underlying cloud provider’s interfaces allows an application to be easily used with multiple clouds. It allows storage features specific to a cloud to be exposed in a standardized manner and enables data to be transparently accessed and migrated as needed in order to take advantage of cloud-specific features without the application being aware of the underlying mechanics, thus reducing or eliminating the limits and vulnerabilities of any one cloud.

Genomics Compute, Storage & Data Management Q&A

September 13, 2021September 13, 2021 Alex McDonald Leave a comment

Everyone knows data is growing at exponential rates. In fact, the numbers can be mind-numbing. Thatâ€™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 â€œMoving Genomics to the Cloud: Compute and Storage Considerations.â€ If you missed the live presentation, itâ€™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?