dd if=/dev/[drive] | gzip -c > zipped_drive_image.bin.gz
Category Archives: Storage
Ocracoke Island Journal: Nookd
I was shocked. Almost immediately I found it hilarious…then outrageous…then both. It is definitely clever. But it raises many questions. E-books can be manipulated at will by the purveyors of the downloadable software. Here is a classic work of fiction some claim it is the greatest novel every written used for a sophomoric and/or commercial prank. What else might be changed in an e-book? Fears of manipulation for economic, political, religious, or other ideological ends come to mind. It makes one wary of the integrity of any digital version of not only War and Peace…but any e-book.
via Ocracoke Island Journal: Nookd.
The .epub format is just zipped html files. Ebooks can be manipulated with any text editor or simple script.
OpenStack Storage
OpenStack Object Storage (code-named Swift) is open source software for creating redundant, scalable object storage using clusters of standardized servers to store petabytes of accessible data. It is not a file system or real-time data storage system, but rather a long-term storage system for a more permanent type of static data that can be retrieved, leveraged, and then updated if necessary. Primary examples of data that best fit this type of storage model are virtual machine images, photo storage, email storage and backup archiving. Having no central “brain” or master point of control provides greater scalability, redundancy and permanence.
via OpenStack Storage » OpenStack Open Source Cloud Computing Software.
Can Fibre Channel survive Ethernet’s assault?
Computerworld – Fibre Channel, the high-speed data transport protocol for storage area networks (SAN), is under increasing pressure as data centers move toward Ethernet for all data network traffic and SAS for hardware interconnects.
By no means is Fibre Channel down and out. In fact, recent figures indicate it’s still showing low single-digit, year-over-year growth. The protocol is currently used in $50 billion worth of equipment around the world, according to research firm Gartner.
via Protocol wars: Can Fibre Channel survive Ethernet’s assault? – Computerworld.
All streaming media recording software (freeware, shareware,…) [windows, linux, mac]
As 60th anniversary nears, tape reinvents itself
The Ultrium Linear Tape Open (LTO) specification, by far the most widely used tape spec in the industry, has a road map that takes tape out to 32TB per cartridge and up to 1.2GB/sec. throughput. “We’ve done a public demonstration of 29.5Gbits of data in a square inch of tape,” said Brian Truskowski, IBM’s general manager of system storage and networking. “We see a lot of headroom in terms of areal density.”
via As 60th anniversary nears, tape reinvents itself – Computerworld.
MySQL :: MySQL Cluster 7.2 GA Released, Delivers 1 BILLION Queries per Minute
MySQL :: MySQL Cluster 7.2 GA Released, Delivers 1 BILLION Queries per Minute.
70x Higher JOIN Performance, NoSQL Key-Value API & Cross Data Center Sharding with Replication
Oracle is delighted to announce the immediate availability of the production-ready, GA release of MySQL Cluster 7.2, available for download under the GPL, and as part of the commercial MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition, including management tools, product certifications and 24×7 global support.
SSDs have a ‘bleak’ future, researchers say
“This makes the future of SSDs cloudy: While the growing capacity of SSDs and high IOP rates will make them attractive for many applications, the reduction in performance that is necessary to increase capacity while keeping costs in check may make it difficult for SSDs to scale as a viable technology for some applications,” Grupp, lead author of the study, wrote in a research paper.
via SSDs have a ‘bleak’ future, researchers say – Computerworld.
Because SSDs have no moving parts, the time needed to write and read data is more than 100 times faster than that of hard disk drives that use read-write heads on actuator arms to find data on a spinning platter. But as NAND flash circuitry continues to shrink in size, the performance gap with hard disk drives will become more narrow, Grupp said.
How Web giants store big—and we mean big—data
The Great Disk Drive in the Sky: How Web giants store big—and we mean big—data.
The need for this kind of perpetually scalable, durable storage has driven the giants of the Web—Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and others—to adopt a different sort of storage solution: distributed file systems based on object-based storage. These systems were at least in part inspired by other distributed and clustered filesystems such as Red Hat’s Global File System and IBM’s General Parallel Filesystem.
And one more blurb…
Google wanted to turn large numbers of cheap servers and hard drives into a reliable data store for hundreds of terabytes of data that could manage itself around failures and errors. And it needed to be designed for Google’s way of gathering and reading data, allowing multiple applications to append data to the system simultaneously in large volumes and to access it at high speeds.
Data sharing with a GFS storage cluster
GFS saves its file system descriptors in inodes that are allocated dynamically (referred to as dynamic nodes or dinodes). They are placed in a whole file system block (4096 bytes is the standard file system block size in Linux kernels). In a cluster file system, multiple servers access the file system at the same time; hence, the pooling of multiple dinodes in one block would lead to more competitive block accesses and false contention. For space efficiency and reduced disk accesses, file data is saved (stuffed) the dinode itself if the file is small enough to fit completely inside the dinode. In this case, only one block access is necessary to access smaller files. If the files are bigger, GFS uses a “flat file” structure. All pointers in a dinode have the same depth. There are only direct, indirect, or double indirect pointers. The tree height grows as much as necessary to store the file data as shown in Figure 1.
via redhat.com | Data sharing with a GFS storage cluster.
