Data Center Advisors

The n-body problem is the problem of predicting the motion of a group of celestial objects that interact with each other gravitationally.

One of the things that is frequently overlooked in archiving is the catalog of the data in the archive. In fact, I refer to a suite of data about data in an archive as metadata (not to overload an already overloaded term, but it can’t be helped). Metadata is the broad term that I use [...]

As my guest blogger, this is Matt’s second installment on his series on Hadoop and MapReduce. Specifically, he explores the viability of the Hadoop and MapReduce framework for Computational Science and Engineering. Traditionally, CSE environments have focused on the inter-processor and parallel communications for forming huge compute clusters. Hadoop and MapReduce are very different approaches [...]

As my guest blogger, Matt is starting to provide more insight about interesting subjects. Here, read part 1 of a multi-part series on the Hadoop and MapReduce architectures compared to traditional programming approaches. Why are Hadoop and MapReduce eating the world? What makes Hadoop so popular and how does Hadoop process volumes of data – [...]

As my first guest blogger, Matthew O’Keefe, PhD provides the conclusion to his 2 part blog on accelerating NAS with hardware by describing the hardware implementation of hardware pipelining.

Today, I get to introduce my first guest blogger, Matthew O’Keefe, PhD. My colleague Matt will discuss hardware accelerating the various components of NAS systems, specifically Hitachi NAS (HNAS, aka BlueArc Mercury), in a multi-part series. Matt’s expertise is in scale-out file systems and kernel development, so you might want to read this thoroughly. Since [...]

I can’t help but enjoy reading some of the comments, debates and other various blog articles on optical storage technologies, especially on technology durability and media longevity, even more when compared to tape storage for long-term digital archiving or as a slightly active data repository. Back in November 2011, I wrote a blog on the [...]

Last week’s  announcement dovetails perfectly with my current series on data archiving, although the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) team may not appreciate my angle based on all their accomplishments with HCP product that go above and beyond just archiving. Be that as it may, I can’t ignore an important feature of the new release of  HCP, [...]

I’d like to start a series of blogs on digital archiving over the next few weeks—primarily, I’ll be making some statements and asking questions. In this first installment, I want to know what is your archive type? Over the past year, I have been talking with customers and have come to a simple set of [...]

Amy Hodler’s post a few weeks ago on the Cloud Blog inspired me to share some of my own geek related book buys from 2011. They are as follows (in my preferred ranking).