BlueWall Pond Storage
Ponds are the name given by BlueWall to local severs running an Kairos instance. BlueWall has designed these ponds to act as both media storage for the original master file, derivative file transcoding for files derived from the master, and syndication storage for broadcasting the metadata image of media in the pond. BlueWall Ponds are powered by Ubuntu Linux. Ponds may be configure in varying scales from a few Terabytes to a few Petabytes. An end user download for Windows and Mac based systems is currently in the works, but any computer may be turned into a BlueWall Pond running Kairos
Let Bluewall help you design a custom pond for your local media needs.
Cloud Storage
Cloud storage is a model of networked online storage where data is stored on virtualized pools of storage. Cloud storage has the same characteristics as cloud computing in terms of agility, scalability, elasticity and multi-tenancy. While cloud storage and cloud computing are the future, it is believed by many experts to have been invented by Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider in the 1960's.
Cloud storage is...
- made up of many distributed resources, but still acts as one
- highly fault tolerant through redundancy and distribution of data
- highly durable through the creation of versioned copies
- typically eventually consistent in regards to data replicas
Cloud storage advantages
Companies need only pay for the storage they actually use as it is also possible for companies by utilizing actual virtual storage features like thin provisioning.
Companies do not need to install physical storage devices in their own datacenter or offices, but the fact that storage has to be placed anywhere stays the same (maybe localization costs are lower in offshore locations).
Storage maintenance tasks, such as backup, data replication, and purchasing additional storage devices are offloaded to the responsibility of a service provider, allowing organizations to focus on their core business, but the fact stays the same that someone has to pay for the administrative effort for this tasks
Amazon S3 / EC2
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an online storage web service offered by Amazon Web Services. Amazon S3 provides storage through web services interfaces (REST, SOAP, and BitTorrent).Amazon launched S3, its first publicly-available web service, in the United States in March 2006 and in Europe in November 2007.
At its inception, Amazon charged end users US$0.15 per gigabyte-month, with additional charges for bandwidth used in sending and receiving data, and a per-request (get or put) charge. As of November 1, 2008, pricing moved to tiers where end users storing more than 50 terabytes receive discounted pricing. Amazon claims that S3 uses the same scalable storage infrastructure that Amazon.com uses to run its own global e-commerce network.
Amazon S3 is reported to store more than 449 billion objects as of July 2011. This is up from 102 billion objects as of March 2010, 64 billion objects in August 2009, 52 billion in March 2009, 29 billion in October 2008, 14 billion in January 2008, and 10 billion in October 2007. S3 uses include web hosting, image hosting, and storage for backup systems. S3 comes with a 99.9% monthly uptime guarantee which equates to approximately 43 minutes of downtime per month.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a central part of Amazon.com's cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS). EC2 allows users to rent virtual computers on which to run their own computer applications. EC2 allows scalable deployment of applications by providing a Web service through which a user can boot an Amazon Machine Image to create a virtual machine, which Amazon calls an "instance", containing any software desired. A user can create, launch, and terminate server instances as needed, paying by the hour for active servers, hence the term "elastic". EC2 provides users with control over the geographical location of instances that allows for latency optimization and high levels of redundancy.
In November 2010, Amazon made the switch of its own retail website to EC2 and AWS.
Rackspace Cloud
Cloud Files
Cloud files is a cloud hosting service that provides "unlimited online storage and CDN" for media (examples given include backups, video files, user content) on a utility computing basis (at USD 0.15/GB/month). It is similar to Amazon Simple Storage Service. Unlimited files of up to 5 GB can be uploaded, managed via the online control panel or RESTful API and optionally served out via Akamai Technologies' Content Delivery Network.
API
In addition to the online control panel the service can be accessed over a RESTful API with open source client code available in C#/.NET, Python, PHP, Java and Ruby. Rackspace-owned Jungle Disk allows Cloud Files to be mounted as a local drive within supported operating systems (Linux, Mac OS X and Windows).
Security
Redundancy is provided by replication three full copies of data across multiple computers in multiple "zones" within the same data center, where "zones" are physically (though not geographically) separate and supplied separate power and Internet services. Uploaded files can be distributed via Akamai Technologies to "hundreds of endpoints across the world" which provides an additional layer of data redundancy.
Cloud Servers
Cloud Servers is a cloud infrastructure service that allows users to deploy "one to hundreds of cloud servers instantly" and create "advanced, high availability architectures" similar to the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. The "cloud servers" are virtual machines running on the Xen hypervisor for Linux-based instances, and Citrix XenServer for Windows instances. Each quad core hardware node has between 16 and 32 GB of RAM, allowing for allocations between 256 MB and 15.5 GB. Disk and CPU allocations scale up with memory, with disk sizes ranging from 10 GB to 620 GB. Various distributions of Linux are supported, including Arch, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Red Hat and Ubuntu.
API
The Cloud Servers API launched on July 14, 2009 under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license allows clients to create, configure and control virtual servers. In addition to issuing basic management commands this "enables elastic scenarios" whereby servers are instantiated and destroyed in response to fluctuating load (one of the key characteristics of cloud computing).
