New Florence. New Renaissance.

Nutanix: Server/Storage Hybrid

"We have brought the storage into the cluster, and we have commoditized it," says Ting, and this is why the US government, financial services firms, healthcare companies, and educational institutions are running a lot of proofs of concepts with the NX-3000 series of appliances.

About 25 per cent of the iron is going to Uncle Sam, which is in many cases putting server clusters into vehicles to get image and signal processing at command posts or into the field in Humvees, in some cases.

Virtual desktop infrastructure was the obvious early-use case for Nutanix machines, and it is still driving a lot of deals, but Ting says the company is seeing companies dump Microsoft workloads such as Exchange Server and SQL Server on the boxes, and has just closed a deal this month with a Global 2000-class company for 1,500 server nodes to run an analytics workload."

The Register

Thanks to Anshu Sharma for pointing out Nutanix's rapid growth in the market

 

Megapixel Surveillance

Megapixel cameras (like those from Arecont Vision in video below) are already at work around the world in large and small applications in every vertical market. Some examples include

• A major grocery distribution center in the United States that uses a 20-megapixel, 180-degree day/night panoramic megapixel camera to provide a complete view of its property.
• In South Korea, a single 2-megapixel camera is being used to cover three lanes of traffic and deliver the resolution required for license plate recognition analytics across all three lanes.
• A jewelry retailer in Mexico uses a handful of megapixel cameras versus a dozen or more conventional cameras to monitor jewelry showcases and restricted areas in the store office and workshop.
• In Hawaii, megapixel cameras are part of an overall effort to protect tourism by supporting public safety. Several factors are converging to make megapixel technology an increasingly mainstream component in video surveillance systems worldwide.

Business Solutions Magazine (sub required)

The growing video feeds are also pushing new paths in storage and analytics as this article from the same issue details

Now that many organizations have experience with deploying and managing large numbers of cameras, Caswell says they are beginning to investigate how video data can be used for more than just forensic purposes (e.g. using video as evidence or for prosecution purposes). The next step in the evolution of surveillance systems includes using video to provide a realtime indication of what is happening. "This involves video analytics," Caswell says. "If you have a camera on a TSA (Transportation Security Administration) line at an airport, for example, you can predict that all of the pixels should be moving the same way. If you see pixels going the other way or in an unusual arrangement, you can analyze those and send alerts. You look at the aberrations."

Dropbox – a “feature” for 100 million users

A CEO gushing about his own product does not impress, but some of the figures tied to Dropbox’s growth do. Each day, Dropbox customers store 1 billion files. The company more or less has to help duplicate a digital version of the Library of Congress every day. By comparison, Twitter has about 140 million people issuing 500 million or so tweets on a daily basis. “But at Dropbox, it’s not 140-character snippets,” says Houston. “It’s your tax returns and your most important stuff.”

Bloomberg BusinessWeek

The video below goes into the impressive architecture that has allowed Dropbox to scale.

Data encoded in DNA

The vial on left is a book. Seriously.

“DNA contains genetic instructions written in a simple but powerful code made up of four chemicals called bases: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C) and thymine (T).

The Harvard researchers started with the digital version of the book, which is composed of the ones and zeros that computers read. Next, on paper, they translated the zeros into either the A or C of the DNA base pairs, and changed the ones into either the G or T.

Then, using now-standard laboratory techniques, they created short strands of actual DNA that held the coded sequence—almost 55,000 strands in all. Each strand contained a portion of the text and an address that indicated where it occurred in the flow of the book.

In that form—a viscous liquid or solid salt—a billion copies of the book could fit easily into a test tube and, under normal conditions, last for centuries, the researchers said”

WSJ thanks to Frank Scavo for spotting

Big Data calls for massive Data Drive

“A data repository almost 10 times bigger than any made before is being built by researchers at IBM's Almaden, California, research lab. The 120 petabyte "drive"—that's 120 million gigabytes—is made up of 200,000 conventional hard disk drives working together. The giant data container is expected to store around one trillion files and should provide the space needed to allow more powerful simulations of complex systems, like those used to model weather and climate.”

MIT Technology Review

Thanks to Ravi Ramakrishnan of HP for bringing it to my notice.

Bush's Legacy - 100 TB

 President Bush is leaving behind 100 terabytes of electronic data. 

"To put that in perspective, all the books, manuscripts, publications and recordings of various kinds stored in the Library of Congress over the past 208 years adds up to 82.6 terabytes.

Archives officials estimate that the Bush administration is leaving behind 50 to 100 times more digital data than the Clinton administration. Given eight years, the Obama administration is expected to shatter Bush's record."

USA Today

"One card does fit all devices"

The Kingston Mobility Kit packages a MicroSD card (typically needed for phones and PDAs) and adapters to allow to use with MiniSD (used with many digital cameras) and full-size SD readers and USB ports (on a laptop).

Earlier in the year I got a 2 GB set for about $ 25.(you can also get a 4 GB HC version for $ 35) Makes it easy to move music, photos, videos, documents across most gadgets, though the USB adapter makes you wish for your own set of "nano-fingers"

Time to throw away old floppies, CDs, USB "jump drive" sticks...

Microsoft's Clearflow

"developed over the last five years by a group of artificial-intelligence researchers at the company’s Microsoft Research laboratories. It is an ambitious attempt to apply machine-learning techniques to the problem of traffic congestion. The system is intended to reflect the complex traffic interactions that occur as traffic backs up on freeways and spills over onto city streets."

"The Clearflow system will be freely available (starting Thursday) as part of the company’s Live.com site (maps.live.com) for 72 cities in the United States."

New York Times

 

The remarkably productive USB thumb drive

Web Worker Daily identifies 10 cool free applications for your thumb drive to carry around and possibly leave your own laptop at home.

Prices are down nicely fro the holidays...a 4GB (yes, not a typo) for $ 25.

Of course, they are also a significant security risk...so consider getting a pricier, but encrypted one.

DNA as storage device

New Scientist

"Imagine having a "living" data storage system that constantly renews itself, keeping the data safe for aeons. A team in Japan has raised the possibility by loading live bacteria with artificial DNA sequences that encode data."