EMC Products

            EMC is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver information technology as a service, which is referred to as TaaS. Central to this conversion is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset that is information in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way.

            EMC has a variety of products that are used for many different purposes. Those products cover solutions that fit the demand of a user to cover storage, data protection, cloud storage, big data, security, content management, and infrastructure management. These varieties of products are available to a multitude of customers that may have different storage needs in mind.

            One product that is offered by EMC is the XtremeIO All-Flash Scale-Out Array. This array was purpose-built for flash; the XtremeIO array is amazingly fast. The EMC XtremeIO lets you harness the power of flash storage by building in innovations like content-bases data placement and dual-stage metadata. As a result, you’ll have predictable and balanced performance, always-on data reduction, thin provisioning, data protection, writeable snapshots, encryption, and simple storage provisioning. This array is ideal for virtual desktop infrastructure, virtual server infrastructure, databases and analytics, and mixed workload consolidation.

            The starter brick of the XtremeIO has 5 TB of raw capacity, with 150K read/write IOPS and 250K Read IOPS. Other options include 1 X-Brick, 2 X-Brick cluster, 4 X-Brick cluster, and the 6 X-Brick cluster. The 6 X-Brick cluster has 120 TB of raw capacity, 900K read/write IOPS, and 1.5M Read IOPS. Some key features of the XtremeIO include: Inherently load balances data for maximum performane without tuning, provides writeable snapshots with space efficiency and zero performance impact, and delivers truly inline, always-on data deduplication to reduce capacity needs to TCO. 

Security of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing seems to be a growing and very useful tool for businesses large or small, and an everyday user like myself. By using a data center I would not have to worry myself of having to by multiple hardware drives and software tools to make use of my data storage. Cloud computing makes this simpler and more efficient to use by having those hardware and software tools readily available. With the growing numbers of data centers and users of cloud computing daily, how can we ensure that our remote storage is safe and manageable at all times?

Cloud computing is typically based on either their deployment or service models. Those models are classified as private cloud, public cloud, community cloud, and hybrid cloud. A private cloud is owned or rented by an organization. A public cloud is owned by a service provider and resources are sold to the public. A community cloud is a cloud resource shared with member of a closed community with similar interests. A hybrid cloud is a combination of two or more cloud infrastructures.

Security is the most important issue to be addressed in the use of cloud computing. Efficiency is a big factor and security is important also. Cloud providers should work together to prevent any and all security issues that may be faced over time. This will reduce concerns that customers may have with using these cloud infrastructures for data storage. Users would like to know that their information is secure and who has control over that information. Important security challenges include: resource location, multi-tenancy issue, authentication and trust of acquired information, system monitoring, and cloud standards.

Cloud computing is a very useful and inexpensive tool to use is some instances. There are many factors that  can contribute to security issues in the cloud infrastructure but they will soon be resolved as cloud computing grows over time. 

Cloud Computing

            The article “A View of Cloud Computing,” by Michael Armbrust, Armando Fox, Rean Griffith, Anthony D. Joseph, Randy Katz, Andy Konwinski, Gunho Lee, David Patterson, Ariel Rabkin, Ion Stoica, and Matei Zaharia was a very interesting piece of information to read. This article explains and talks about a variety of topics that have to do with cloud computing including the definition, economics, and top ten obstacles and opportunities for cloud computing. As the article did, I would like to touch base on a few of these key points and topics.

First off I would like to define the concept of cloud computing. Cloud computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the internet and the hardware and systems software in the data centers that provide those services, as stated in the article.  The services provided by cloud computing are often referred to as Software-as-a-service (SaaS). Hardware and software that are located at any data center is what will be called a cloud. Many different categories of computing are explained in this article also, as well as what may be expected and or offered by different data center companies. Three aspects of cloud computing are new from a provisioning and pricing point of view: Appearance of infinite computing resources available on demand, elimination of up-front commitment by cloud users, and the ability to pay for use of computing resources on a limited basis.

The growth of cloud computing has certain obstacles that are faced over a period of time. This article has compiled a top ten list of adoption, growth, and policy and business obstacles. They include: Availability, data lock-in, data confidentiality, data transfer bottlenecks, performance unpredictability, scalable storage, bugs in large distribution systems, scaling quickly, reputation fate sharing, and finally software licensing. Each obstacle in this list is matched with a unique opportunity which include options such as using multiple cloud providers, standard API’s, deploy encryptions, FedExing disks, imporved VM support, invent scalable store, and so on.

As this article was very interesting I do look forward to reading about more cloud computing future tasks and goals. I would also like to see these goals in action in the near future as cloud computing is growing rapidly. 

Backup & Archive

Backup and Archive

The article for this week is entitled “A Novel Approach to Automated, Secure, Reliable, & Distributed Backup of MER Tactical Data on Clouds.” This article was very interesting and gave plenty of factual information on backup and archive data. The table of contents of this article include: introduction, cloud computing for backup storage, methodology, results, interpretations, conclusions, recommendations, acknowledgements, references, and biographies. All of these headings have important information with regard to the topic.

            This article is based around the 2010 MER project, which stands for Mars Exploration Rover. This was the first NASA mission to include a public cloud into its daily mission-critical operations. This switch allowed the availability of one hundred percent of save data, search data, and retrieval of data. The public cloud operation also allowed cost savings, durability, and reliability. “The Operations Storage System (OSS) on MER currently contains 21 TB of data, which includes both uplink and downlink data,” as mentioned in the article. This is a lot of storage space to save plenty of data. Future steps for the MER’s cloud journey is to incorporate new generation storage solutions into data backup and retention strategies. Data that is uploaded is never introduced to the key into the cloud environment due to the novel encryption techniques used by NASA.

            This was a well written article that shared a lot of information on the cloud data storage process of the 2010 Mars Rover Project. It is interesting how new technologies are being used every day and in missions such as this one. 

Storage Companies

Data storage technology consists of computer components and recording media used to retain digital data. It is the core function and fundamental component of computers. Most companies today rely on the use of data storage technology for a variety of reasons. It is important that these storage devices work efficiently. Without a significant amount of memory, a computer would merely be able to perform fixed operations and immediately output the result.

Storage technologies at all levels of the storage hierarchy can be differentiated by evaluating certain core characteristics as well as measuring characteristics specific to a particular implementation. These core characteristics are volatility, mutability, accessibility, and addressability. For any particular implementation of any storage technology, the characteristics worth measuring are capacity and performance.

According to StorageNewsletter.com, the top twelve storage companies in 2013 were: EMC, WD, Seagate, Micron, NetApp, SanDisk, IBM, HDS, HP, Symantec, LSI, and Dell. This website also states that “global revenue of Top 12 Storage Companies increased 5 percent from 2012 to 2013, compared to 10 percent from 2011 to 2012.” Right away a few of these companies stand out to me, such as EMC, SanDisk, IBM, HP, and Dell. These few companies stand out to me because of something that I may have read about them or if I have seen some of their products in local stores.

Companies such as IBM sell many products but their data storage products include: Disk systems, flash systems, tape systems, storage software, and network attached storage. These products have many different features and handle mostly all of your data storage needs. Pretty much any data storage technology need that you have can be easily addressed by many of these products and services. 

Fast & Furious 7

On April 3rd, 2015 the 7th edition to the Fast & Furious movie series will be released. I honestly can't wait to see this film. This movie series is one of my all time favorites. The Fast & Furious movies showcase modified cars, action, and a great storyline that has entertained me and also kept my attention since the very first film. 

     Fast & Furious 7 was written by Chris Morgan and directed by James Wan. This movie stars Vin Diesal, Paul Walker, Dwayne Johnson, Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, Lucus Black and Jason Statham. This movie showcases the events happening after The Fast and The Furious: Tokyo Drift. The trailer leaves the audience in suspense with its action packed events. 

     This movies series has never disappointed me and I look forward to watching this one. A downside to this movie is that it will have the final appearance of Paul Walker due to his death on November 30, 2013. In my opinion this could be the last Fast & Furious movie because of that event. I hope that it won't be the last of the film series but things won't be the same without Walker. I can not wait to be in theaters on April 3rd to watch this movie. 

Tablets in the Workplace

tablet article 

In latest news according to this article is how tablet devices have become a major part in today’s company IT strategy. The article is entitled “Tablets now Workplace Standard, says Dell.” It explains how tablets are a part of 90 percent of IT Company’s strategy. I can believe this statement because in every school meeting there is usually someone controlling a slide show or presentation using a tablet device. Using tablets has made many everyday tasks easier to do in a limited amount of time.

“Dell's tablet group vice-president Neil Hand said the results show the way people work is changing. 

"Days spent going to a specific place to conduct business are fewer, while more employees are on the move and require access to company information outside of the workplace,” he said.

Android takes the top spot for supplied tablet operating systems in the UK, with 69% of organizations supplying Android tablets to workers. Other operating systems were more popular overseas, with Microsoft Windows coming first in the US and Apple's iOS leading in Japan (article).” This portion of the article explains the portability of tablets. Wireless networks make it possible to exchange information and data with ease. The use of cameras helps to conduct online meetings without having to be in the same room. And google applications make it possible to exchange documents to one or more employees, colleagues, or any member of a company.  This article also talks about how the use of tablet will steadily increase as years pass. This captured my attention as well as an interesting and factual article to read.

Cloud Storage

Cloud Storage

Large companies, smaller companies, and very few individual people use a high amount of data storage on a daily basis. Most people however don’t need a lot of storage depending on the data and or the applications they intend on using. Cloud storage can be utilized if someone or a company doesn’t plan on using their computer hard drive space or portable storage device to carry around with them day to day. Cloud storage refers to saving data to an off-site storage facility maintained by third party. Instead of storing your data and information on your computer hard drive or local storage device, you can save it to a remote database. Your internet connection provides communication between your computer and the remote database which stores all your information.

As with anything, there are advantages and disadvantages. An advantage over traditional data storage is that when you store your data, you will be able to get to that data from any location that provides internet access. You would not also have to carry around a physical storage device or use the same computer to save and retrieve your information. Most cloud storage data centers allow you to let other people access one or more saved files that is available on your cloud. 

A disadvantage would be that if you are not able to connect to the internet, you won’t be able to access your cloud data. This isn’t so much of a problem due to public Wi-Fi areas and hangouts. Other disadvantages or security issue with using cloud storage include data leakage, snooping, cloud credentials, and performance. There have been some recent reports of how data has been compromised due to cloud storage which has me on the fence about using it for certain storage applications. The whole idea of cloud storage is interesting but there are still a lot of bugs that need to be worked out for it to be a completely secure tool to use. 

Science Friday

Podcast Blog

This week’s assignment involved a podcast that is updated every week about science. This podcast is described as a weekly discussion of the latest news in science, technology, health, and the environment. Science Friday is hosted by Ira Flatow. Ira interviews scientists, authors, and policymakers, and listeners are able to call in and ask questions as well.

I am personally don’t listen to or watch podcasts but the whole idea of a podcast has gained my attention overall. While searching through the iTunes podcast I found categories that sparked my interest, technology being one of them. This particular blog assignment may have helped me find a new source of entertainment and information gain in my everyday life. I feel as though I can keep up with current events, topics, news, technology, science and many more.

This podcast was titled “Quantum: An Ode to Particle Physics.” This podcast was relatively short, having a length of three minutes and six seconds and shown on October 2, 2014. The speaker and main view of the video was Gilles Jobin, a choreographer and artist. He basically talked about how he incorporated the principles of physics into a six person dance routine. The performers had on a one piece spandex suit with zig-zag line designs on them. The lights above the performers were swinging in a circular motion, each one at a different time. Jobin says that “science is human,” and that it is the “story of our lives.” This is what inspired him to create this type of performance routine. In this podcast he explains how he used the effect of vibrations and human body movements to represent magnetic forces that occur in physics. Vibrations, forces, and movements create the heat illusion that he made visible in the routine. This different way of thinking helped Jobin create this routine known as the Ode to Physics. 

RAID

RAID

ITT 305

As you can see this blog entry will be about RAID array. If you did not know RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. RAID was created to combine multiple less-expensive drives into a single, higher capacity volume. The design of arrays was also made to assist disk redundancy. This design is known as fault tolerance. Disk redundancy was taken into account because of the idea of one or two disk failures. Most often you may read or hear about one or two disk redundancy, which is the number of drives that can fail while the disk remains usable. The redundancy of a disk array is important due to the amount and importance of the data that has been stored. 

RAID has methods of how the drives are gathered together known as RAID levels. Three types of commonly used levels in a small-office situation are RAID 0, RAID 1, and RAID 5. These are the common levels but there are more levels to choose from depending on how they are projected to be used. 

RAID 0: Faster performance, RAID 0, distributes data across multiple drives. By doing this, RAID 0 has increased write and read speeds. This method is referred to as stripping. This RAID array has no protection against drive failure and your data will most likely be gone. 

RAID 1: Reads and writes the same data to pairs of drives, referred to as mirroring. Since the data is mirror, if one drive fails you can still continue to access your data from the other working disk. You will only be able to use 50 percent of your total drive capacity. 

RAID 5: This RAID offers speed and data redundancy. This RAID writes data and reads from multiple disks. All data is distributed across all the disks on the array. Since parity info is saved across all the drives, any drive can fail without causing the entire array to fail. Performance can improve for RAID 5 due to the data being read from multiple disks.

Open Source Software

This particular blog is about my favorite open source software or product. Open source software is everywhere on the internet. Even most of our blogs are run by BlogSpot or WordPress right now. I do not particularly have a favorite but I do have a few that I like. The open source product/software that I plan on talking about is Mozilla Firefox. As you all know it is a web browser available on Windows, Apple OS X, Linux, and android devices. When it comes down to what browser I use more I would have to say Firefox. 

This browser is arguably the most software for internet browsing due to its privacy features.

Firefox limits scripts from accessing data from other web sites. This browser also has add and pop up blockers for sites that users don’t intend on coming up. Most people don’t know but the Mozilla Foundation offers what they call a “bug bounty” which is a $3000 cash reward for researchers who discover severe security holes that the Firefox browser may have. Firefox does not have as many or fewer publically known security issues when compared to other browser's which is why I choose to use it more.
 

Firefox comes loaded with plenty of features including basic features and newer more updated features. Some include bookmarks, pop-up blocking, download manager, find as you type, session restore, spell checker, smart tool bar, add-ons, themes, and many more. I probably use the bookmarks, pop-up blocking, and download manager more than any other features that are offered by this browser. All of the other features offered are just a plus in my book. Firefox also allows its users to customize the browser and access apps, which is a step forward as far as open source browser features. According to the Firefox website, it is currently the fastest when compared to other browsers like Chrome, Opera, internet explorer, and Opera Next. Due to these key features I plan on using this software browser for many days to come and look forward to what they have in store for the future.