Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Panasas to Open-Source pNFS Client Code - Data Storage from eWeek
The company takes a leadership position in an effort to get high-performance parallel NFS for storage systems passed as an industry standard.
High-performance storage system maker Panasas announced May 22 that it will release the source code of its parallel file system client software, called DirectFLOW, to the open-source community.
The Parallel Network File System, or pNFS, is a complex Panasas-created technology engineered to solve storage I/O bottlenecks and accelerate customer deployments of parallel storage solutions, a Panasas spokesperson said. It enables direct parallel data transfer—as opposed to the standard, narrower, one-lane file system—between clients and storage devices.
pNFS is a critical component of NFS version 4.1, the first major performance upgrade to the widely deployed NFS in more than a decade.
NFS typically is used in system stacks with Linux, Apache (for Web servers) and other open-source software. pNFS support is expected to be used on Linux, Windows, and the leading UNIX versions from the major computer vendors, the spokesperson said.
Panasas, based in Fremont, Calif., will be open-sourcing code of the DirectFLOW client for Linux to the storage and developer community—specifically, the object layout driver and iSCSI drivers.
The code will be made available later this summer to the storage community for free download on the Panasas Web site and at the pNFS site.
pNFS will eventually be released as part of the NFS version 4.1 standard, the spokesperson said. The open-source initiative continues the companys role in shaping the pNFS standard, which was initiated by Dr. Garth Gibson, Panasas founder and chief technology officer and one of the originators of RAID.
Precursor to the coming standard
Panasas DirectFLOW protocol is a precursor to the pNFS standard and provides all of the functionality expected to be available in the protocol when it is formally reviewed by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) later this year.
Given the close technical collaboration with the industry-wide pNFS development team and eight years of experience in parallel file system development, Panasas intends to be first supplier to offer fully pNFS compatible parallel storage systems, the spokesperson said.
"pNFS is a very significant trend for high-performance computing," Addison Snell, an analyst with Tabor Research, told eWEEK. "It will create a standard for scalable cluster file systems. It is certainly complex, but it is being driven out of necessity."
Click here to read about a clash over industry storage standards.
Parallel storage based on pNFS is the next evolution beyond clustered NFS storage and the best way for the industry to solve storage and I/O performance bottlenecks, said Robin Harris, senior analyst at the Data Mobility Group.
"Panasas was the first to identify the need for a production-grade, standard parallel file system and has unprecedented experience in deploying commercial parallel storage solutions," Harris said.
"You wont see it in your dentists office"
Harris said that the big win for pNFS is the high-performance space, where interconnect speeds have long lagged application requirements. "Geophysical modeling, computational chemistry, financial risk analysis, medical imaging and 3-D rendering are all strong candidates for pNFS," Harris told eWEEK.
"You wont see pNFS in your dentists office. Anywhere compute clusters are now used is a potential win. I think a surprise upside market will be video editing, where NLE stations will have two or even four [Gigabit Ethernet] ports to move terabytes of uncompressed HD video," Harris said.
Later this year, the IETF NFSv4 subcommittee is expected to conclude its work on the protocol as part of the NFS version 4.1 RFC (Request For Comment). This new standard is being jointly developed by storage industry technology leaders and members of the NFSv4 working group, including Panasas, IBM, EMC, Network Appliance, Sun Microsystems, and the University of Michigans Center for Information Technology Integration.
Is Panasas that far ahead of everyone else in this sector?
"I dont discount what IBM, EMC, [Network Appliance] and Sun, also members of the IETF NFS committee, can do if theyre focused," Harris told eWEEK. "Yet Panasas CTO [Gibson] ... wrote the original pNFS problem statement for the IETF. Panasas has provided parallel file serving for commercial and research HPC using a very similar architecture for several years. Clearly theyve been more focused on the pNFS opportunity than anyone else."
The complexity of the pNFS isnt likely to turn off many storage people, Harris said. "Setting up a pNFS server shouldnt be any more complex than setting up any filer head. Youll have more Ethernet cables to plug in to more boxes, but NFS v4.1 will hide the details of parallel access to data from users and applications," Harris said.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
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Thursday, April 15, 2010
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Friday, April 9, 2010
Chrome Browser, Unhacked - Gadgetwise Blog - NYTimes.com
Chrome Browser, Unhacked - Gadgetwise Blog - NYTimes.com: "“It’s one more layer of defenses you have to get through,” he says. Attackers targeting large numbers of Web users aren’t likely to bother with it — not when there are other browsers to hit. Neither Firefox nor Safari use sandboxes. Newer versions of Internet Explorer have a similar feature called Protected Mode that users can activate."
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Friday, April 2, 2010
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Judge Invalidates Human Gene Patent - NYTimes.com
Judge Invalidates Human Gene Patent - NYTimes.com: "Bryan Roberts, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist, said the decision could push more work aimed at discovering genes and diagnostic tests to universities."
Monday, March 29, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Researchers use light from LEDs to send data wirelessly
Researchers use light from LEDs to send data wirelessly: "Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications at the Heinrich-Hertz Institute in Berlin experimented with using visible light from commercial light-emitting diodes to carry data wirelessly at speeds of up to 230Mbit/sec."
NPR and WSJ Building Ipad-Only Websites - NYTimes.com
NPR and WSJ Building Ipad-Only Websites - NYTimes.com: "Today, companies are already tasked with creating a traditional website, a mobile website and sometimes a customized mobile website designed just for iPhone visitors. Now there's the iPad-only website to code for and soon there may be another one, too. Recent news reports state that Amazon is working on a new web browser just for their Kindle e-Reader. Will that be yet another website needing its own custom version?"
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Monday, March 8, 2010
Does the Cloud Need a Specialized Chip? – GigaOM
Does the Cloud Need a Specialized Chip? – GigaOM: "A key problem in all of these endeavors is figuring out how to get the multiple chips or cores to function together in such a way that performance scales linearly with the addition of each new core rather than tapering off as the communications between the cores or chips becomes overloaded. Intel and Tilera are hoping to do this on the chip itself, while systems vendors are trying to do it with a better box."
Economist.com
Economist.com: "Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier"
How Pandora Avoided the Junkyard, and Found Success - NYTimes.com
How Pandora Avoided the Junkyard, and Found Success - NYTimes.com: "Pandora’s success can be credited to old-fashioned perseverance, its ability to harness intense loyalty from users and a willingness to shift directions — from business to consumer, from subscription to free, from computer to mobile — when its fortunes flagged."
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Apple sues HTC over phones with Google software - washingtonpost.com
Apple sues HTC over phones with Google software - washingtonpost.com: "In its ITC filing against HTC, Apple noted that some of the patents at issue are at the center of its legal fight with Nokia."
Dot-com bust ripples still felt 10 years later
Dot-com bust ripples still felt 10 years later: "Flowtown.com, which creates personal and professional profiles of people by gathering information from social networks, data it then sells to marketers."
The Spark That Could Ignite Web M&A – GigaOM
The Spark That Could Ignite Web M&A – GigaOM: "Over the past several years, web content has developed something of a split personality. Part of it is driven by information, navigated by search and static in nature. The other part is driven by conversation, accessed through discovery and protean in essence. This distinction has been around for some time, and discussed at length on this site, but it’s becoming more and more of an acute reality, especially when it comes to big web companies."
Former Book Designer Says Good Riddance to Print - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
Former Book Designer Says Good Riddance to Print - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com: "roadly into two categories: content where the form is important, such as poetry or text with graphics, and content where form is divorced from layout, which he says applies to most novels and non-fiction."
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010
Network Acceleration | Silver Peak Systems, Inc.
Network Acceleration | Silver Peak Systems, Inc.: "Silver Peak utilizes a proprietary round trip measurement scheme that enables RTTs to be calculated more efficiently. This leads to more accurate RTO (retransmission timeout) measurements which, in turn, improves throughput."
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Monday, February 22, 2010
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
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