April 24, 2014, Data Storage Innovations Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Gideon Senderov from NEC described an architecture for PB/hr backup and long term archive. The needs for very high volume backup will continue to increase as more sources and mobile devices generate data. A trend in data is towards more data being non-context dependent, and now…
April 22, 2014, Data Storage Innovation Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Mark McKinnon from Grand River Conservation Authority in Canada described the changes in their systems to address the data backup issues of TB-sized volumes. Fortunately, the systems change was coincident with a network upgrade. The Grand River Conservation Authority is responsible for flood control, recreation, nature…
November 13, 2013, AMD Developer Summit, San Jose, CA—Gary Demos from Image Essence described the fundamentals and other requirements for real-time 4k high dynamic range video decoding. The computational requirements of decoding video at high frame rates and high dynamic range have to fill a 25.5 Gb/s pipeline. One of the key issues for this…
September 18, 2013, Storage Developer Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Julia Palmer and Justin Richardson from Go Daddy described their efforts at incorporating best practices in storage infrastructure implementation and validation. They have moved from ad hoc and incremental changes to full validation practices. The drivers in the storage spaces are bigger, better, and faster, all at…
September 11, 2013, Intel Developer Forum, San Francisco—Recep Ozdag from Intel and Gershon Schatzberg from Wind River presented a reference design for software-defined network platform switches. Software-defined networking expands the network virtualization to network functions and enables data-control plane separation. Virtualization has driven utilization rates in datacenters to over 50 percent and has enabled large…
July 24, 2013, Siggraph, Anaheim, CA—We met with Imagination to look at their latest software and acceleration hardware for graphics. The Caustic tools can use the ray-tracing accelerator card, has a simplified user interface, and has visualization links to other tools. The ray tracing technology is moving into the professional markets for some parts of…
January 29, 2013, SNIA Non-Volatile Memory Summit, Santa Clara, CA—Andy Rudoff from Intel the special requirements for programming NVMs. The technologies are capable of much greater bandwidth, reduced latency, and are creating a new storage classification; persistent memory. This new set of functions is able to retain data through power cycles and other upset events…
August 7, 2012, Siggraph, Los Angeles—We talked with Zoran Veselic from Christie about their HoloStation. The system is intended for scientific visualization and simulation where interactive immersion is needed. This is a four projector personal-sized CAVE (Computer Assisted Virtual Environment) for users who need a smaller environment than the traditional caves, which are the size…
February 14, 2012, Cloud Connect Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Jesse Robbins from OpSource described the efforts and requirements to operate in the cloud at scale. The systems need to be robust, and the operators need to be prepared for failures. As operations and software grow in scale, all aspects of the operations increase in complexity, and…