Databases on Object Storage - the New Normal

Databases on Object Storage - the New Normal

When you think about object storage workloads and storage types - databases are not the first thing that comes to mind. That is changing rapidly, however, driven by just two forces: the availability of true, high performance object storage and explosive growth of data and, perhaps more impactfully, its associated metadata. Because of these two forces, almost every major database

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The Trouble With Cassandra: Why It's a Poor Choice For a Metadata Database for Object Stores

The Trouble With Cassandra: Why It's a Poor Choice For a Metadata Database for Object Stores

Cassandra is a popular, tried-and-true NoSQL database that supports key-value wide-column tables. Like any powerful tool, Cassandra has its ideal use cases - in particular, Cassandra excels at supporting write-heavy workloads, while having limitations when supporting read-heavy workloads. Cassandra's eventual consistency model and lack of transactions, multi-table support like joins, subqueries can also limit its usefulness. However, using

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Why Small Objects Are Such a Big Deal

Why Small Objects Are Such a Big Deal

Over the last decade or so, object storage use cases have evolved considerably as they replace traditional file and block use cases. Specifically the need to work with small data objects is becoming commonplace. Yes, there’s still plenty of large objects but small objects are becoming more prevalent than large for specific workloads and application environments. Traditional object storage

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Impact of Intel vs. ARM CPU Performance for Object Storage

Impact of Intel vs. ARM CPU Performance for Object Storage

The recent announcement from AWS about the general availability of their new ARM-powered Graviton2 servers caused us to take another look at the performance of these ARM servers. In this blog post we describe the results which you may find surprising. Introduction MinIO [https://github.com/minio/minio] is an Apache licensed, open source S3-compatible object storage server with a

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Introducing Sidekick - A High Performance Load Balancer

Introducing Sidekick - A High Performance Load Balancer

Almost all of the modern cloud-native applications use HTTPs as their primary transport mechanism even within the network. Every service is a collection of HTTPs endpoints provisioned dynamically at scale. Traditional load balancers that are built for serving web applications across the Internet are at a disadvantage here since they use old school DNS round-robin techniques for load balancing and

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Five Strata Takeaways

Five Strata Takeaways

With another Strata in the rearview mirror, it is time to reflect on what we saw and heard during the week. Strata is clearly a data science show at this point but data science is broad topic. Our perspective, as a provider of high performance object storage, is framed accordingly and we focus on the data stack more than we

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Hadoop HDFS's Logical Successor

Hadoop HDFS's Logical Successor

The demise of Hadoop is probably overblown. It will not suddenly disappear from the enterprise landscape - there are simply too many clients, too much sunk investment for it to vanish into the night. What is not overblown is the fact that Hadoop, like countless technologies before it, is in secular, irreversible decline. There are a number of reasons but

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Benchmarking MinIO vs. AWS S3 for Apache Spark

Benchmarking MinIO vs. AWS S3 for Apache Spark

Apache Spark is a framework for distributed computing. It provides one of the best mechanisms for distributing data across multiple machines in a cluster and performing computations on it. Spark achieves this by constructing data structures called RDDs (Resilient Distributed Datasets). RDDs allow data to be broken into disparate chunks and processed independently of one another. The individual chunks can

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