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80% of disk drives worldwide are only 20% full, says Ben Gloub, CEO of innovative cloud provider Storj.

This fact is the very reason Storj exists.

Storj taps into this existing storage capacity from tens of thousands of nodes worldwide, eliminating the need to build new drives and data centres, he tells Capacity.

And alongside the obvious sustainability benefits this provides, it allows Storj to offer cloud storage for a tenth of the price of legacy providers. Golub says that the carbons emissions saved by using this model can reach up to 83%.

Storing data securely across tens of thousands of nodes worldwide eliminates a single point of failure, and because of parallelism, reduces congestion. This enables Storj to deliver upload and download speeds that are consistently high compared to players like AWS, Golub claims. The distributed model is also able to meet requirements that cloud users desire, such as speed, reliability, security, global accessibility and low cost.

However, industries that handle highly sensitive data like healthcare and finance need to meet certain compliance requirements that limit where data can be stored, Golub says.

This has inspired Storj to launch Storj Select, a new enterprise feature that delivers customisation on which of the thousands of nodes specific data is stored. With Storj Select, customer data is only stored on points of presence which meet customer specified qualifications.

Cloudwave, a provider of healthcare data security solutions, was revealed yesterday as one of Storj Selects first customers.

The more than 280 hospitals that we work with across six countries are focused on protecting patients. Our role is to protect their patient data from cyber attacks, CloudWave said.

Storj Select's uniquely customisable compliance features, speed and security is a key component of our cloud strategy.

The idea for Storj Select came directly as a result of feedback from enterprises who were interested in switching to its cloud storage platform, but couldnt because they needed to meet specific compliance requirements.

The new feature allows Storj to store data only on the storage nodes that meet those qualifications, such as SOC2, a a voluntary compliance standard that governs how data should be protected.

Storj Select opens the door for us to serve more customers like CloudWave which is now a Storj customer because of the existence of Storj Select, Golub says.

As a disruptive startup, we have to be agile to meet our customers needs, he continues. There are several aspects of our business model and architecture that allow us to bring this type of service online very quickly.

Firstly, because Storj use existing capacity thats already spun, powered and cooled in data centres, it doesnt face the same supply chain challenges of other providers when it comes to sourcing the physical hardware to bring a multi-petabyte storage service online.

Storj were also able to leverage globally distributed facilities that already had SOC2 certifications in place, further reducing the time to market.

It was a coordinated effort to build the product capabilities, source the supply, and onboard our first enterprise customer, but 90% of what we needed was already in place, Golub says.

Golub also says that the product capabilities Storj built enables it to be much more dynamic in how it selects and restricts the nodes that will store a particular data set.

This enabled us to bring a tier of storage online that stores data only in SOC2 Type2 data centres in the US very rapidly,

How does it work?

Instead of storing data on a few centralised data centres that are vulnerable to outages and cyber attacks, Storj encrypts and splits data into small pieces including redundancy that are then stored across its global network, Golub explains.

When a download request is made, only a small subset of the fastest data segments are needed to reconstitute the file. This distributed architecture is designed to protect against outages, ransomware, and data compromise.

Storj Select takes this one step further and enhances data security by ensuring that customer data is only stored on nodes that meet the specific compliance requirements of that customer.

The distribution of data on the network is critical to performance, durability and security of data stored on the network, Golub continues.

All of the processes for selecting nodes for storing a particular object, distributing the encrypted pieces of erasure encoded data to nodes, auditing the nodes and repairing data is fully automated.

Those processes are highly scalable, both horizontally by adding more nodes and resources, as well as vertically by scaling up the resources of a particular node, he explains.

The Storj Select service does require an initial manual process to set placement rules or geofenced regions and choose where the data in particular buckets or projects will be stored .

But once a placement rule is created and applied, everything after that is fully automated.

That automation ensures we achieve our eleven 9s of durability with billions of objects stored on the Storj network in tens of billions of pieces distributed over 10s of thousands of nodes in over 100 countries, Golub says.

Whats next for Storj?

Were continuing to innovate and adapt Storj to better meet the needs of our growing customer base. Additionally, we have some exciting new integrations, customers, partnerships and sustainability initiatives coming down the pipeline that well be sure to keep you apprised of! Golub concludes.

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What if there was AirBnb for the Cloud? - Capacity Media

At its annual HPE Discover event in Barcelona Thursday, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) unveiled a range of new and enhanced hybrid cloud products -- including storage, development tools, and rack-scale hardware co-engineered with Nvidia -- aimed at easing the development and deployment of generative AI systems for enterprises.

"We think the next decade is going to require full stack thinking from hardware all the way up through the software layers, as organizations lean into the deployment of AI applications," Evan Sparks, HPE's vice president and general manager for AI Solutions and Supercomputing Cloud told a news conference. "These applications are extremely computationally intensive. They require data as a first-class input and lots of lots of data. And our view is that this new architecture will require more thinking in terms of scale-up processing; they need to do workloads that are hybrid by design."

The announcement came a day after HPE announced its fourth-quarter earnings in which revenue and profit were down on the whole and down for traditional categories of storage and computing but up for high-performance computing, AI, and intelligent edge. While overall revenue declined 7% year over year to $7.4 billion, and traditional compute sales for servers was down 31% to $2.6 billion, intelligent edge revenue jumped 41% to $1.4 billion and HPC and AI products were up 37% to $1.2 billion.

HPE GreenLake for File Storage, an all-flash data platform, is adapting to better support growing and evolving large-scale AI workloads, including those based on generative AI and large language models (LLMs). The platform has been upgraded for AI model training and tuning. The improvements include increased performance density, integration with Nvidias new Quantum-2 InfiniBand for better GPU-focused computing, and significantly boosted throughput and capacity.

HPE previously said it is launching a cloud-based service powered by its supercomputers to support advanced AI applications. Initially focusing on LLMs, HPE plans to extend this service to specialized AI applications in areas including climate modeling, healthcare, finance, manufacturing, and transportation. Part of the HPE GreenLake portfolio, these services will be distinct in being exclusively cloud-based, unlike other GreenLake offerings that are on-premises or hybrid.

HPE and Nvidia are collaborating to develop a computing hardware and software platform specifically for generative AI tuning and inferencing -- the process where an AI model makes predictions and decisions on news data -- in enterprise data centers. The idea is to make it easier for businesses, regardless of their size, to adapt and use AI. This new offering is designed to be user-friendly, allowing companies to customize AI models with private data and deploy them from local devices to cloud-based systems.

The hardware component of the platform is based on a rack-scale architecture, where computing components are managed at the level of an entire rack of servers as a single entity to optimize resources. It includes HPE ProLiant Compute DL380a servers incorporating Nvidia L40S GPUs and Nvidia BlueField-3 DPUs (data processing units).

HPE's Machine Learning Development Environment Software has been updated to a managed service as a cloud-based solution for AI model training. The service, also included in its new AI tuning platform, is intended to help businesses quickly and safely start or advance their generative AI projects. It simplifies the training process of AI models, supposedly making it faster to develop them, and its designed to adapt to future needs, reducing the strain on management and processing resources. Additionally, the software includes new features for generative AI to enable quick testing and prototyping of models.

The new AI platform also includes HPE Ezmeral Software, which has been updated to make it easier and quicker for businesses to handle data, analytics, and AI tasks. The software platform, which allows users to run cloud-native or non-cloud-native applications in containers, is designed to work smoothly across various cloud environments. Key updates include a more efficient hybrid data lakehouse, which is now better optimized for GPU and CPU usage, facilitating easier data management and analysis. Also, integration with HPE Machine Learning Development Environment Software is meant to improve model training and tuning. The software also features better GPU allocation management, enhancing performance across different workloads. Moreover, Ezmeral now supports more third-party tools, such as Whylogs for monitoring models and Voltron Data for faster, GPU-accelerated data queries.

Customers will be able to order the new AI platform and the various updated components in the first quarter of 2024.

HPE also announced a GreenLake Flex Solution for Digital Twin built on Nvidia OVX-certified HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers with Nvidia L40S GPUs. The solution is meant to allow users to create, simulate, and optimize virtual assets and processes. Its a scalable, multi-GPU framework that provides the necessary infrastructure, software, and services to leverage the benefits of industrial digitalization. The digital twin features AI-accelerated infrastructure and Nvidia Omniverse Enterprise, designed to enable rapid insights from all available data. The company says the solution combines a public clouds flexibility with a private clouds security.

A digital twin is like a virtual model of a real-life object or system. This technology, which started with individual items, now covers bigger things like buildings, factories, and whole cities. Some people even think it can be used for people and the way things are done, making the idea of digital twins much broader.

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HPE goes all-in for AI with new hybrid cloud compute, storage products - Network World

As photographers, having a safe place to back up our images is essential, especially if clients are dependent on our material.

Create your own archive

Every photographer works with their own archive system this could be chronologically ordered or structured according to different themes or projects. As long as it makes sense to you and the material can be accessed quickly, there is no right or wrong system. Remember to import photos regularly to back them up and save time with your organisation.

External hard drives are a solution for photographers who travel a lot and need access to their images with or without an internet connection. In general, keep an eye on these three key features: speed, storage size and safety.

Apart from backing up essential data, organizing files is also important for many professional photographers. Modern camera technology allows us to produce huge amounts of digital files, however, even if they are safely stored, these images are of little use if we do not save them to an archive with a proper filing system. After all, we dont want our valuable work and precious memories to be hidden away in folders where they cant be shared with the world.

This works with a local cloud storage system, customised to your projects needs. NAS systems arent usually equipped with hard disks inside, so you will need to back up your files. The advantage here is that it works through a WLAN connection, meaning that everyone who uses this specific network can access files via a password. For example, the WD My Cloud EX2 Ultra NAS drive is an excellent system, which is even equipped with a dual bay for RAID setups.

A RAID drive is one of the safest storage services around. It operates with two or more hard disks that work like mirrors and create an exact copy of the data. Systems are available in different expansion levels, including the TerraMaster D5 Thunderbolt 3, which works with five disks. That means you can make more than one copy of your files so there isnt the same risk of losing material through technical issues or failure.

A great solution when it comes to not only saving current projects but also your whole photography archive, a desktop drive can often be more affordable than other solutions. It also operates offline, which ensures a high level of security as no additional third party can access your files. The WD My Book Duo, for example, is an excellent solution it operates offline, has an impressive storage of up to 24TB and features two bays for RAID support.

Photographers often lead busy lives, travelling around and requiring access to their images wherever they are. One simple and practical solution is a portable SSD their size, weight and robust housing mean you can take them with you wherever you go. However, most devices operate with only one hard disk, so you may need an additional backup device. The LaCie Rugged RAID Pro is an advanced solution that automatically provides a backup but is more expensive than other SSDs.

There are lots of cloud-based storage services competing to offer you a place to back up your files. The advantage here is that you can access files from any device, wherever you are and you can easily share projects with clients or the rest of the team. Google Drive operates with the same security protocol as other Google services. One downside of this storage system is that the rate at which data uploads depends on your internet speed and so uploading large files can often take a long time.

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Get to know the different storage options for your irreplaceable digital images - Digital Camera World