We recently wrote about Hadoop’s HDFS and how it was once mighty and instrumental in big data, but today the file system’s flaws leave it buckling under modern analytics and AI workloads. Anyone working in those spaces needs to be aware of these disadvantages. But what about the rest of…

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…

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…

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…

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. …

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…

“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…

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…

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…