Category: Data Analytics

Digital Twins

Digital Twins Q&A

Michael Hoard Leave a comment

A digital twin (DT) is a virtual representation of an object, system or process that spans its lifecycle, is updated from real-time data, and uses simulation, machine learning and reasoning to help decision-making. Digital twins can be used to help answer what-if AI-analytics questions, yield insights on business objectives and make recommendations on how to control or improve outcomes.

It’s a fascinating technology that the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) discussed at our live webcast “Journey to the Center of Massive Data: Digital Twins.” If you missed the presentation, you can watch it on-demand and access a PDF of the slides at the SNIA Educational Library. Our audience asked several interesting questions which are answered here in this blog.

Q. Will a digital twin make the physical twin more or less secure?

 A. It depends on the implementation.If DTs are developed with security in mind,a DT can help augment the physical twin. Example, if the physical and digital twins are connected via an encrypted tunnel that carries all the control, management, and configuration traffic, then a firmware update of a simple sensor or actuator can include multi-factor authentication of the admin or strong authentication of the control application via features running in the DT, which augments the constrained environment of the physical twin. However, because DTs are usually hosted on systems that are connected to the internet, ill-protected servers could expose a physical twin to a remote intruder. Therefore, security must be designed from the start.

Q. What are some of the challenges of deploying digital twins?

A. Without AI frameworks and real-time interconnected pipelines in place digital twins’ value is limited.

Q. How do you see digital twins evolving in the future?

A. Here are a series of evolutionary steps:

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What are Digital Twins?

Michael Hoard Leave a comment

Have you ever wondered how intelligent Industry 4.0 factories or smart cities of the future will process massive amounts of sensor and machine data? What you may not expect is a digital twin will most likely play a role. A digital twin is a virtual representation of an object, system or process that spans its lifecycle, is updated from real-time data, and uses simulation, machine learning and reasoning to help decision-making. Digital twins can be used to help answer what-if AI-analytics questions, yield insights on business objectives and make recommendations on how to control or improve outcomes.

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5G, Edge, and Industry 4.0 Q&A

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.

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A Q&A on Big Data in the Cloud

Chip Maurer Leave a comment

The title of our recent live SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies webcast, “Cloud Storage and Big Data, A Marriage Made in the Clouds” 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 experts’ 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 organization’s expertise, reliability, cost, application availability and location, and your overall storage strategy.

Q. What drives organizations to modernize?

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Genomics Compute, Storage & Data Management Q&A

Alex McDonald Leave a comment

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?

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Can Cloud Storage and Big Data Live Happily Ever After?

Chip Maurer Leave a comment

“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:

  • A short history of Big Data
  • The impact of edge computing
  • The erosion of the data center
  • Managing data-on-the-fly
  • Grid management
  • Next-gen Hadoop and related technologies
  • Supporting AI workloads
  • Data gravity and distributed data  

Register today! Our speakers will be ready to take your questions and black-tie is not required for this wedding!

Moving Genomics to the Cloud

Alex McDonald Leave a comment

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:

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Extending Storage to the Edge

Jim Fister Leave a comment

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
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Q&A: Cloud Analytics Takes Flight

Jim Fister Leave a comment

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?

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Cloud Analytics Drives Airplanes-as-a-Service Business

Jim Fister Leave a comment

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 “Cloud Analytics Drives Airplanes-as-a-Service Business” for views from both start-up and established companies on how to revisit the analytics decision process with a discussion on:

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