Category: Data availability

Releasing social and mobile data as a public good

Posted on by Ray in data access, Data availability, Data science, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy, Visionary leadershp

I have been reading a book recently, called Uncharted: Big data as a lens on human culture by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel that discusses the use of Google’s Ngram search engine which counts phrases (Ngrams) used in all the books they have digitized. Ngram phrases are charted against other Ngrams and plotted in real time.

It’s an interesting concept and one example they use is “United States are” vs. “United States is” a 3-Ngram which shows that the singular version of the phrase which has often been attributed to emerge immediately after the Civil War actually was in use prior to the Civil War and really didn’t take off until 1880’s, 15 years after the end of the Civil War.

I haven’t finished the book yet but it got me to thinking. The authors petitioned Google to gain access to the Ngram data which led to their original research. But then they convinced Google after their original research time was up to release the information to the general public. Great for them but it’s only a one time event and happened to work this time with luck and persistance.

The world needs more data

But there’s plenty of other information or data out there where we could use to learn an awful lot about human social interaction and other attributes about the world that are buried away in corporate databases. Yes, sometimes this information is made public (like Google), or made available for specific research (see my post on using mobile phone data to understand people mobility in an urban environment) but these are special situations. Once the research is over, the data is typically no longer available to the general public and getting future or past data outside the research boundaries requires yet another research proposal.

And yet books and magazines are universally available for a fair price to anyone and are available in most research libraries as a general public good for free.  Why should electronic data be any different?

Social and mobile dta as a public good

What I would propose is that the Library of Congress and other research libraries around the world have access to all corporate data that documents interaction between humans, humans and the environment, humanity and society, etc.  This data would be freely available to anyone with library access and could be used to provide information for research activities that have yet to be envisioned.

Hopefully all of this data would be released, free of charge (or for some nominal fee) to these institutions after some period of time has elapsed. For example, if we were talking about Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, Instagram feeds, etc. the data would be provided from say 7 years back on a reoccurring yearly or quarterly basis. Not sure if the delay time should be 7, 10 or 15 years, but after some judicious period of time, the data would be released and made publicly available.

There are a number of other considerations:

  • Anonymity – somehow any information about a person’s identity, actual location, or other potentially identifying characteristics would need to be removed from all the data.  I realize this may reduce the value of the data to future researchers but it must be done. I also realize that this may not be an easy thing to accomplish and that is why the data could potentially be sold for a fair price to research libraries. Perhaps after 35 to 100 years or so the identifying information could be re-incorporated into the original data set but I think this highly unlikely.
  • Accessibility – somehow the data would need to have an easily accessible and understandable description that would enable any researcher to understand the underlying format of the data. This description should probably be in XML format or some other universal description language. At a minimum this would need to include meta-data descriptions of the structure of the data, with all the tables, rows and fields completely described. This could be in SQL format or just XML but needs to be made available. Also the data release itself would then need to be available in a database or in flat file formats that could be uploaded by the research libraries and then accessed by researchers. I would expect that this would use some sort of open source database/file service tools such as MySQL or other database engines. These database’s represent the counterpart to book shelves in today’s libraries and has to be universally accessible and forever available.
  • Identifyability – somehow the data releases would need to be universally identifiable, not unlike the ISBN scheme currently in use for books and magazines and ISRC scheme used for recordings. This would allow researchers to uniquely refer to any data set that is used to underpin their research. This would also allow the world’s research libraries to insure that they purchase and maintain all the data that becomes available by using some sort of master worldwide catalog that would hold pointers to all this data that is currently being held in research institutions. Such a catalog entry would represent additional meta-data for the data release and would represent a counterpart to a online library card catalog.
  • Legality – somehow any data release would need to respect any local Data Privacy and Protection laws of the country where the data resides. This could potentially limit the data that is generated in one country, say Germany to be held in that country only. I would think this could be easily accomplished as long as that country would be willing to host all its data in its research institutions.

I am probably forgetting a dozen more considerations but this covers most of it.

How to get companies to release their data

One that quickly comes to mind is how to compel companies to release their data in a timely fashion. I believe that data such as this is inherently valuable to a company but that its corporate value starts to diminish over time and after some time goes to 0.

However, the value to the world of such data encounters an inverse curve. That is, the longer away we are from a specific time period when that data was created, the more value it has for future research endeavors. Just consider what current researchers do with letters, books and magazine articles from the past when they are researching a specific time period in history.

But we need to act now. We are already over 7 years into the Facebook era and mobile phones have been around for decades now. We have probably already lost much of the mobile phone tracking information from the 80’s, 90’s, 00’s and may already be losing the data from the early ’10’s. Some social networks have already risen and gone into a long eclipse where historical data is probably their lowest concern. There is nothing that compels organizations to keep this data around, today.

Types of data to release

Obviously, any social networking data, mobile phone data, or email/chat/texting data should all be available to the world after 7 or more years.  Also the private photo libraries, video feeds, audio recordings, etc. should also be released if not already readily available. Less clear to me are utility data, such as smart power meter readings, water consumption readings, traffic tollway activity, etc.

I would say that one standard to use might be if there is any current research activity based on private, corporate data, then that data should ultimately become available to the world. The downside to this is that companies may be more reluctant to grant such research if this is a criteria to release data.

But maybe the researchers themselves should be able to submit requests for data releases and that way it wouldn’t matter if the companies declined or not.

There is no way, anyone could possibly identify all the data that future researchers would need. So I would err on the side to be more inclusive rather than less inclusive in identifying classes of data to be released.

The dawn of Psychohistory

The Uncharted book above seems to me to represent a first step to realizing a science of Psychohistory as envisioned in Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy. It’s unclear whether this will ever be a true, quantified scientific endeavor but with appropriate data releases, readily available for research, perhaps someday in the future we can help create the science of Psychohistory. In the mean time, through the use of judicious, periodic data releases and appropriate research, we can certainly better understand how the world works and just maybe, improve its internal workings for everyone on the planet.

Comments?

Picture Credit(s): Amazon and Wikipedia 

Data of the world, lay down your chains

Posted on by Ray in Crowdsourcing, Data availability, Data readability, data services, Information economy
Prison Planet by AZRainman (cc) (from Flickr)
Prison Planet by AZRainman (cc) (from Flickr)

GitHub, that open source free repository of software, is taking on a new role, this time as a repository for municipal data sets. At least that’s what a recent article on the Atlantic.com website (see Catch my Diff: GitHub’s New Feature Means Big Things for Open Data) after GitHub announced new changes in its .GeoJSON support (see Diffable, more customizable maps)

The article talks about the fact that maps in Github (using .GeoJSON data) can be now DIFFed, that is see at a glance what changes have been made to it. In the one example in the article (easier to see in GitHub) you can see how one Chicago congressional district has changed over time.

Unbeknownst to me, GitHub started becoming a repository for geographical data. That is any .GeoJson data file can be now be saved as a repository on GitHub and can be rendered as a map using desktop or web based tools. With the latest changes at GitHub, now one can see changes that are made to a .GeoJSON file as two or more views of a map or properties of map elements.

Of course all the other things one can do with GitHub repositories are also available, such as FORK, PULL, PUSH, etc. All this functionality was developed to support software coding but can apply equally well to .GeoJSON data files. Because .GeoJSON data files look just like source code (really more like .XML, but close enough).

So why maps as source code data?

Municipalities have started to use GitHub to host their Open Data initiatives. For example Digital Chicago has started converting some of their internal datasets into .GeoJSON data files and loading them up on GitHub for anyone to see, fork, modify, etc.

I was easily able to login and fork one of the data sets. But there’s a little matter of pushing your committed changes to the project owner that needs to happen before you can modify the original dataset.

Also I was able to render the .GeoJSON data into a viewable map by just clicking on a commit file (I suppose this is a web service). The ReadME file has instructions for doing this on your desktop outside of a web browser for R, Ruby and Python.

In any case, having the data online, editable and commitable would allow anyone with GitHub account to augment the data to make it better and more comprehensive. Of course with the data now online, any application could make use of it to offer services based on the data.

I guess that’s what Open Data movement is all about, make government, previously proprietary data freely available in a standardized format, and add tools to view and modify it, in the hope that businesses see a way to make use of it in new ways. As such, In  the data should become more visible and more useful to the world and the cities that are supporting it.

If you want to learn more about Project Open Data see the blog post from last year on Whitehouse.gov or the GitHub Project [wiki] pages.

Comments?

DR preparedness in real time

Posted on by Ray in data access, Data availability, Disaster Recovery, File Storage

As many may have seen there has been serious flooding throughout the front range of Colorado.  At the moment the flooding hasn’t impacted our homes or offices but there’s nothing like a recent, nearby disaster to focus one’s thoughts on how prepared we are to handle a similar situation.

 

What we did when serious flooding became a possibility

As I thought about what I should be doing last night with flooding in nearby counties, I moved my computers, printer, some other stuff from the basement office to an upstairs area in case of basement flooding. I also moved my “Time Machine” backup disk upstairs as well which holds the iMac’s backups (hourly for last 24 hrs, daily for past month and weekly backups [for as many weeks that can be held on a 2TB disk drive]). I have often depended on time machine backups to recover files I inadvertently overwrote, so it’s good to have around.

I also charged up all our mobiles, laptops & iPads and made sure software and email were as up-to-date as possible.  I packed up my laptop & iPad, with my most recent monthly and weekly backups and some other recent work printouts into my backpack and left it upstairs ready to go at a moments notice.

The next day post-mortum

This morning with less panic and more time to think, the printer was probably the least of my concerns but the internet and telecommunications (phones & headset) should probably have been moved upstairs as well.

Although we have multiple mobile phones, (AT&T) reception is poor in the office and home. It would have been pretty difficult to conduct business here with the mobile alone if we needed to.  I use a cable provider for business phones but also have a land line for our home. So I (technically) have triple backup for telecom, although to use the mobile effectively, we would have had to leave the office.

Internet access

Internet is another matter though. We also use cable for internet and the modem that supplies office internet connects to a cable close to where it enters the house/office. All this is downstairs, in the basement. The modem is powered using basement plugs (although it does have a battery as well) and there’s a hard ethernet link between the cable modem and an Airport Express base station (also downstairs) which provides WiFi to the house and LAN for the house iMacs/PCs.

Considering what I could do to make this a bit more flood tolerant, I should have probably moved the cable modem and Airport Express upstairs connecting it to the TV cable and powering it using upstairs power. Airport Express WiFi would have provided sufficient Internet access to work but with the modem upstairs connecting an ethernet cable to a desktop would also have been a possibility.

I do have the hotspot/tethering option for my mobile phone but as discussed above, reception is not that great. As such, it may have not sufficed for the household, let alone a work computer.

Internet is available at our local library and at many nearby coffee shops.  So, worst case was to take my laptop and head to a coffee shop/library that still had power/WiFi and camp out all day, for potentially multiple days.

I could probably do better with Internet access. With the WiFi and tethering capabilities available with cellular iPad these days, if I should just purchase one for the office, with a suitable data plan, I could have used the iPad as another hot spot, independent of my mobile. Of course, I would probably go with a different carrier so that reception issues could also be minimized (hoping where one [AT&T] is poor the other [Verizon?] carrier would be fine).

Data availability

Data access outside of the Time Machine disk and the various hard drive backups was another item I considered this morning.  I have a monthly, hard-drive backups, normally kept in a safety deposit box at a local bank.

The bank is in the same flood/fire plane that I am in, but the tell me it’s floodproof, fireproof and earthquake proof.  Call me paranoid but I didn’t see any fire suppression equipment visible in the vault. The vault door although a large quantity of steel and other metals didn’t seem to have waterproof seals surrounding it.  As for earthquakes, concrete walls, steel door doesn’t mean it’s eartquake proof.  But then again, I am paranoid, it would probably survive much better than anything in our home/office.

Also, I keep weekly encrypted backups in the house, alternating between two hard disk drives and keep the most recent upstairs. So between the weeklies, monthlies, and Time Machine I have three distinct tiers of data backups. Of course, the latest monthly was sitting in the house waiting to be moved to the safety deposit box – not good news.

I also have  a (manual) copy of work data on the laptop, current to the last hard backup (also at home). So of my three tiers of backup every single current one of them was in the home/office.

I could do better. Looking at Dropbox and Box for about $100/year/100GB (DropBox, Box is ~40% cheaper) I could keep our important work and home data on cloud storage and have access to it from any Internet accessible location (including with mobile devices) with proper security credentials. Not sure how long it would take to seed this backup we have about 20Gb of family and work office documents and probably another 120GB or so of photos that I would want to keep around or about 140GB of info.  This could provide 5-way redundancy with Time machine, weekly hard drive and monthly hard drive backups and now Box/Dropbox for a for a (office and home) fourth backup, with  the laptop being a fifth (office only) backup.  Seems like cheap insurance at the moment.

The other thing that Box/DropBox would do for me is to provide a synch service with my laptop so that files changed on either device would synch to the cloud and then be copied to all other devices.  This would substitute my current 4th tier of (work) backups with a more current, cloud backup. It would also eliminate the manual copy process performed during every backup to keep my laptop up to date.

I have some data security concerns with using cloud storage, but according to Dropbox they use Amazon S3 for their storage and AES-256 data encryption so that others can’t read your data. They use SSL to transfer data to the cloud.

Where all the keys are held is another matter and with all the hullabaloo with NSA, anything on the internet can be provided to the gov’t with a proper request. But the same could be said for my home computer and all my backups.

There are plenty of other solutions here, Google drive and Microsoft’s SkyDrive to name just a few. But from what I have heard Dropbox is best, especially if you have a large number of files.

The major downsides (besides the cost) is that when you power up your system it can take longer while Dropbox scans for out-of-synch files and the time it takes to seed your Dropbox account. This is all dependent on your internet access, but according to a trusted source Dropbox seeding starts with smallest files and works up to the larger ones over time. So there is a good likelihood your office files (outside of PPT) might make it to the cloud sooner than your larger media, databases, and other large files.  I figure we have about ~140GB to be copied to the cloud. I promise to update the post with the time it took to copy this data to the cloud.

Power and other emergency preparedness

Power is yet another concern.  I have not taken the leap to purchase a generator for the home/office. But now think this unwise. Although power has gotten a lot more reliable in our home/office over the years, there’s still a real possibility that there could be a disruption. The areas with serious flooding all around us are having power blackouts this morning and no telling when their power might get back on. So a generator purchase is definitely in my future.

Listening to the news today, there was talk of emergency personnel notifying people that they had 30 minutes to evacuate their houses.  So, next time there is a flood/fire warning in the area I think I will take some time to pack up more than my laptop. Perhaps some other stuff like clothing and medicines that will help us survive and continue to work.

Food and water are also serious considerations. In Florida for hurricane preparedness  they suggest filling up your bathtubs with water or having 1 gallon of water per person per day set aside in case of emergency – didn’t do this last night but should have.  Florida’s family emergency preparedness plan also suggests enough water for 5-7 days.

I think we have enough dry food around the house to sustain us for a number of days (maybe not 7 though). If we consider whats in the freezer and fridge that probably goes up to a couple of weeks or so, assuming we can keep it cold.

Cooking food is another concern. We have propane and camp stoves which would provide rudimentary ability to cook outdoors if necessary as well as an old charcoal grill and bag of charcoal in our car-camping stuff. Which should suffice for a couple of days but probably not a week.

As for important documents they are in that safety deposit box in our flood plain. (May need to rethink that). Wills and other stuff are also in the hands of appropriate family members and lawyers so that’s taken care of.

Another item on their list of things to have for a hurricane is flashlights and fresh batteries. These are all available in our camping stuff but would be difficult to access in a moments notice. So a couple of rechargeable flashlights that were easier to access might be a reasonable investment. The Florida plan further suggests you have a battery operated radio. I happen to have an old one upstairs with the batteries removed – just need to make sure to have some fresh batteries around someplace.

They don’t mention gassing up your car. But we do that as a matter of course anytime harsh weather is forecast.

I think this is about it for now. Probably other stuff I didn’t think of. I have a few fresh fire extinguishers around the home/office but have no pumps. May need to add that to the list…

~~~~

Comments?

Photo Credits: September 12 [2013], around 4:30pm [Water in Smiley Creek – Boulder Flood]

 

 

Who’s the next winner in data storage?

Posted on by Ray in CIFS/SMB, Cloud services, Cloud storage, data access, Data availability, data services, Distributed computing, FC, FCoE, NFS, Object storage, Storage, Storage availability, Strategic Inflection Points, Strategy, Visionary organizations
Strange Clouds by michaelroper (cc) (from Flickr)
Strange Clouds by michaelroper (cc) (from Flickr)

“The future is already here – just not evenly distributed”, W. Gibson

It starts as it always does outside the enterprise data center. In the line of businesses, in the development teams, in the small business organizations that don’t know any better but still have an unquenchable need for data storage.

It’s essentially an Innovator’s Dillemma situation. The upstarts are coming into the market at the lower end, lower margin side of the business that the major vendors don’t seem to care about, don’t service very well and are ignoring to their peril.

Yes, it doesn’t offer all the data services that the big guns (EMC, Dell, HDS, IBM, and NetApp) have. It doesn’t offer the data availability and reliability that enterprise data centers have come to demand from their storage. require. And it doesn’t have the performance of major enterprise data storage systems.

But what it does offer, is lower CapEx, unlimited scaleability, and much easier to manage and adopt data storage, albeit using a new protocol. It does have some inherent, hard to get around problems not the least of which is speed of data ingest/egress, highly variable latency and eventual consistency. There are other problems which are more easily solvable, with work, but the three listed above are intrinsic to the solution and need to be dealt with systematically.

And the winner is …

It has to be cloud storage providers and the big elephant in the room has to be Amazon. I know there’s a lot of hype surrounding AWS S3 and EC2 but you must admit that they are growing, doubling year over year. Yes it is starting from a much lower capacity point and yes, they are essentially providing “rentable” data storage space with limited or even non-existant storage services. But they are opening up whole new ways to consume storage that never existed before. And therein lies their advantage and threat to the major storage players today, unless they act to counter this upstart.

On AWS’s EC2 website there must be 4 dozen different applications that can be fired up in the matter of a click or two. When I checked out S3 you only need to signup and identify a bucket name to start depositing data (files, objects). After that, you are charged for the storage used, data transfer out (data in is free), and the number of HTTP GETs, PUTs, and other requests that are done on a per month basis. The first 5GB is free and comes with a judicious amount of gets, puts, and out data transfer bandwidth.

… but how can they attack the enterprise?

Aside from the three systemic weaknesses identified above, for enterprise customers they seem to lack enterprise security, advanced data services and high availability storage. Yes, NetApp’s Amazon Direct addresses some of the issues by placing enterprise owned, secured and highly available storage to be accessed by EC2 applications. But to really take over and make a dent in enterprise storage sales, Amazon needs something with enterprise class data services, availability and security with an on premises storage gateway that uses and consumes cloud storage, i.e., a cloud storage gateway. That way they can meet or exceed enterprise latency and services requirements at something that approximates S3 storage costs.

We have talked about cloud storage gateways before but none offer this level of storage service. An enterprise class S3 gateway would need to support all storage protocols, especially block (FC, FCoE, & iSCSI) and file (NFS & CIFS/SMB). It would need enterprise data services, such as read-writeable snapshots, thin provisioning, data deduplication/compression, and data mirroring/replication (synch and asynch). It would need to support standard management configuration capabilities, like VMware vCenter, Microsoft System Center, and SMI-S. It would need to mask the inherent variable latency of cloud storage through memory, SSD and hard disk data caching/tiering.. It would need to conceal the eventual consistency nature of cloud storage (see link above). And it would need to provide iron-clad, data security for cloud storage.

It would also need to be enterprise hardened, highly available and highly reliable. That means dually redundant, highly serviceable hardware FRUs, concurrent code load, multiple controllers with multiple, independent, high speed links to the internet. Todays, highly-available data storage requires multi-path storage networks, multiple-independent power sources and resilient cooling so adding multiple-independent, high-speed internet links to use Amazon S3 in the enterprise is not out of the question. In addition to the highly available and serviceable storage gateway capabilities described above it would need to supply high data integrity and reliability.

Who could build such a gateway?

I would say any of the major and some of the minor data storage players could easily do an S3 gateway if they desired. There are a couple of gateway startups (see link above) that have made a stab at it but none have it quite down pat or to the extent needed by the enterprise.

However, the problem with standalone gateways from other, non-Amazon vendors is that they could easily support other cloud storage platforms and most do. This is great for gateway suppliers but bad for Amazon’s market share.

So, I believe Amazon has to invest in it’s own storage gateway if they want to go after the enterprise. Of course, when they create an enterprise cloud storage gateway they will piss off all the other gateway providers and will signal their intention to target the enterprise storage market.

So who is the next winner in data storage – I have to believe its going to be and already is Amazon. Even if they don’t go after the enterprise which I feel is the major prize, they have already carved out an unbreachable market share in a new way to implement and use storage. But when (not if) they go after the enterprise, they will threaten every major storage player.

Yes but what about others?

Arguably, Microsoft Azure is in a better position than Amazon to go after the enterprise. Since their acquisition of StorSimple last year, they already have a gateway that with help, could be just what they need to provide enterprise class storage services using Azure. And they already have access to the enterprise, already have the services, distribution and goto market capabilities that addresses enterprise needs and requirements. Maybe they have it all but they are not yet at the scale of Amazon. Could they go after this – certainly, but will they?

Google is the other major unknown. They certainly have the capability to go after enterprise cloud storage if they want. They already have Google Cloud Storage, which is priced under Amazon’s S3 and provides similar services as far as I can tell. But they have even farther to go to get to the scale of Amazon. And they have less of the marketing, selling and service capabilities that are required to be an enterprise player. So I think they are the least likely of the big three cloud providers to be successful here.

There are many other players in cloud services that could make a play for enterprise cloud storage and emerge out of the pack, namely Rackspace, Savvis, Terremark and others. I suppose DropBox, Box and the other file sharing/collaboration providers might also be able to take a shot at it, if they wanted. But I am not sure any of them have enterprise storage on their radar just yet.

And I wouldn’t leave out the current major storage, networking and server players as they all could potentially go after enterprise cloud storage if they wanted to. And some are partly there already.

Comments?

 

Enhanced by Zemanta

Cheap phones + big data = better world

Posted on by Ray in Crowdsourcing, Data analytics, Data availability, Data science, Information economy, Strategic Inflection Points, Visionary organizations
Big data visualization, Facebook friend connections, Data science
Facebook friend carrousel by antjeverena (cc) (from flickr)

Read an article today in MIT Technical Review website (Big data from cheap phones) that shows how cheap phones, call detail records (CDRs) and other phone logs can be used to help fight disease and help understand disaster impacts.

Cheap phones generate big data

In one example, researchers took cell phone data from Kenya and used it to plot people movements throughout the country. What they were looking for is people who frequented malaria disease hot spots so that they could try to intervene in the transmission of this disease. Researchers discovered one region (cell tower) that had many people that were frequenting a particular bad location for malaria.  It turned out the region they identified had a large plantation with many migrant workers. These workers moved around a lot.  In order to reduce the transmission of the disease public health authorities could target this region to use more bed nets or try to reduce infestation at source of the disease.  In either case, people mobility was easier to see with cell phone data than actually putting people on the ground and counting where people go or come from.

In another example, researchers took cell phone data from Haiti before and after the earthquake and were able to calculate how many people were in the region hardest hit by the earthquake.  They were also able to identify how many people left the region and where the went to.  As a follow on to this, researchers were able to in real time show how many people had fled the cholera epidemic.

Gaining access to cheap phone data

Most of this call detail record data is limited to specific researchers for very specialized activities requested by the host countries. But recently  Orange released 2.5 billion cell phone call and text data records for five million customers they have in Ivory Coast that occurred during five months time.  They released the data to the public under some specific restrictions in order to see what data scientists could do with it. The papers detailing their activities will be published at a MIT Data for Development conference.

~~~~

Big data’s contribution to a better world is just beginning but from what we see here there’s real value in data that already exists, if only the data were made more widely available.

Comments?

Big open data leads to citizen science

Posted on by Ray in Crowdsourcing, Data, Data availability, Data discovery, data logistics, Visionary organizations

Read an article the other day in ScienceLine about the Astronomical Data Explosion.  It appears that as international observatories start to open up their archives and their astronomical data to anyone and anybody, people are starting to do useful science with it.

Hunting for planets

The story talked about a pair of amateur astronomers who were looking through Kepler telescope data which had recently been put online (see PlanetHunters.org) to find anomalies that signal the possibility of a planet.  They saw a diming of a particular star’s brightness and then saw it again 132 days later. At that point they brought it to the attention of real scientists who later discovered that what they found was a 4 star solar system which they labeled Tatooine.

It seems with all the latest astronomical observations coming in from Kepler, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Hubble observatories are generating a deluge of data. And although all this data is being subjected to intense scrutiny by professional astronomers, they can’t do everything they want to do with it.

Consequently, in astronomy today we now have come to a new world of abundant data but not enough resources to do all the science that can be done.  This is where the citizen or amateur scientist enters the picture. Using standard web accessible tools they are able to subject the data to many more eyes each looking for whatever interest spurs them on and as such, can often contribute real science from their efforts.

Citizen science platforms

It turns out PlanetHunters.org is one of a number of similar websites put up by Zooniverse to support citizen science in astronomy, biology, nature, climate and humanities. Their latest project is to classify animal found in snapshots taken on the Serengheti (see SnapshotSerengeti.org).

Of course crowdsourced scientific activity like this has been going on for a long time now with Boinc projects like SETI@Home screen savers that sifted through radio signals searching for extra-terestial signals. But that made use of the extra desktop compute cycles people were waisting with screen savers.

 

In contrast, Zooniverse started with the GalaxyZoo project (original retired site here). They put Hubble telescope images online and asked for amateur astronomers to classify the type of galaxies found in the images.

GalaxyZoo had modest aspirations at first but when they put the Hubble images online their servers were overwhelmed with the response and had to be beefed up considerably to deal with the traffic.  Overtime, they were able to get literally millions of galaxy classifications. Now they want more, and the recent incarnation of GalaxyZoo has put the brightest 250K galaxies online and they are asking for even finer, more detailed classifications of them.

Today’s Zooniverse projects are taking advantage of recent large and expanding data repositories plus newer data visualization tools to help employ human analysis to their data.  Automated tools are not yet sophisticated enough to classify images as well as a human can.

One criteria for Zooniverse projects is to have a massive amount of data which needs to be classified.  In this way, science is once again returning to it’s amateur roots but this time guided by professionals.  Together we can do more than what either could do apart.

~~~~

I suppose it was only a matter of time before science got inundated with more data than they could process effectively.  Having the ability to put all this data online, parcel it out to concerned citizens and ask them to help understand/classify it has brought a new dawn to citizen science.

Comments?

Photo credits:
Twin Suns on Mos Espa by Stéfan
BONIC running SETI@Home by Keng Susumpow
Galaxy Group Stephan’s Quintet by HubbleColor {Zolt}

Million year optical disk

Posted on by Ray in Data availability, Data integrity, Data readability, Optical storage, Scenario planning, Storage longevity, System effectiveness, Tape storage

Read an article the other day about scientists creating an optical disk that would be readable in a million years or so. The article in Science Mag titled A million – year hard disk was intended to warn people about potential dangers in the way future that were being created today.

A while back I wrote about a 1000 year archive which was predominantly about disappearing formats. At the time, I believed given the growth in data density that information could easily be copied and saved over time but the formats for that data would be long gone by the time someone tried to read it.

The million year optical disk eliminates the format problem by using pixelated images etched on media. Which works just dandy if you happen to have a microscope handy.

Why would you need a million year disk

The problem is how do you warn people in the far future not to mess with radioactive waste deposits buried below. If the waste is radioactive for a million years, you need something around to tell people to keep away from it.

Stone markers last for a few thousand years at best but get overgrown and wear down in time. For instance, my grandmother’s tombstone in Northern Italy has already been worn down so much that it’s almost unreadable. And that’s not even 80 yrs old yet.

But a sapphire hard disk that could easily be read with any serviceable microscope might do the job.

How to create a million year disk

This new disk is similar to the old StorageTek 100K year optical tape. Both would depend on microscopic impressions, something like bits physically marked on media.

For the optical disk the bits are created by etching a sapphire platter with platinum. Apparently the prototype costs €25K but they’re hoping the prices go down with production.

There are actually two 20cm (7.9in) wide disks that are molecularly fused together and each disk can store 40K miniaturized pages that can hold text or images. They are doing accelerated life testing on the sapphire disks by bathing them in acid to insure a 10M year life for the media and message.

Presumably the images are grey tone (or in this case platinum tone). If I assume 100Kbytes per page that’s about 4GB, something around a single layer DVD disk in a much larger form factor.

Why sapphire

It appears that sapphire is available from industrial processes and it seems impervious to wear that harms other material. But that’s what they are trying to prove.

Unclear why the decided to “molecularly” fuse two platters together. It seems to me this could easily be a weak link in the technology over the course of dozen millennia or so. On the other hand, more storage is always a good thing.

~~~~

In the end, creating dangers today that last millions of years requires some serious thought about how to warn future generations.

Image: Clock of the Long Now by Arenamontanus

OCZ’s latest Z-Drive R4 series PCIe SSD

Posted on by Ray in Block Storage, Data availability, Data integrity, SSD storage, Storage performance
OCZ_Z-Drive_RSeries (from http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-z-drive-r4-r-series-pci-express-ssd.html)
OCZ_Z-Drive_RSeries (from http://www.ocztechnology.com/ocz-z-drive-r4-r-series-pci-express-ssd.html)

OCZ just released a new version of their enterprise class Z-drive SSD storage with pretty impressive performance numbers (up to 500K IOPS [probably read] with 2.8GB/sec read data transfer).

Bootability

These new drives are bootable SCSI devices and connect directly to a server’s PCIe bus. They come in half height and full height card form factors and support 800GB to 3.2TB (full height) or 300GB to 1.2TB (half height) raw storage capacities.

OCZ also offers their Velo PCIe SSD series which are not bootable and as such, require an IO driver for each operating system. However, the Z-drive has more intelligence which provides a SCSI device and as such, can be used anywhere.

Naturally this comes at the price of additional hardware and overhead.   All of which could impact performance but given their specified IO rates, it doesn’t seem to be a problem.

Unclear how many other PCIe SSDs exist today that offer bootability but it certainly puts these drives in a different class than previous generation PCIe SSD such as available from FusionIO and other vendors that require IO drivers.

MLC NAND

One concern with new Z-drives might be their use of MLC NAND technology.  Although OCZ’s press release said the new drives would be available in either SLC or MLC configurations, current Z-drive spec sheets only indicate MLC availability.

As  discussed previously (see eMLC & eSLC and STEC’s MLC posts), MLC supports less write endurance (program-erase and write cycles) than SLC NAND cells.  Normally the difference is on the order of 10X less before NAND cell erase/write failure.

I also noticed there was no write endurance specification on their spec sheet for the new Z-drives.  Possibly,  at these capacities it may not matter but, in our view, a write endurance specification should be supplied for any SSD drive, and especially for enterprise class ones.

Z-drive series

OCZ offers two versions of their Z-drive the R and C series, both of which offer the same capacities and high performance but as far as I could tell the R series appears to be have more enterprise class availability and functionality. Specifically, this drive has power fail protection for the writes (capacitance power backup) as well as better SMART support (with “enterprise attributes”). These both seem to be missing from their C Series drives.

We hope the enterprise attribute SMART provides write endurance monitoring and reporting.  But there is no apparent definition of these attributes that were easily findable.

Also the R series power backup, called DataWrite Assurance Technology would be a necessary component for any enterprise disk device.  This essentially saves data written to the device but not to the NAND just yet from disappearing during a power outage/failure.

Given the above, we would certainly opt for the R series drive in any enterprise configuration.

Storage system using Z-drives

Just consider what one can do with a gaggle of Z-drives in a standard storage system.  For example, with 5 Z-drives in a server, it could potentially support 2.5M IOPs/sec and 14GB/sec of data transfer with some resulting loss of performance due to front-end emulation.  Moreover, at 3.2TB per drive, even in a RAID5 4+1 configuration the storage system would support 12.8TB of user capacity. One could conceivably do away with any DRAM cache in such a system and still provide excellent performance.

What the cost for such a system would be is another question. But with MLC NAND it shouldn’t be too obscene.

On the other hand serviceability might be a concern as it would be difficult to swap out a failed drive (bad SSD/PCIe card) while continuing IO operations. This could be done with some special hardware but it’s typically not present in standard, off the shelf servers.

—-

All in all a very interesting announcement from OCZ.  The likelihood that a single server will need this sort of IO performance from a lone drive is not that high (except maybe for massive website front ends) but putting a bunch of these in a storage box is another matter.  Such a configuration would make one screaming storage system with minimal hardware changes and only a modest amount of software development.

Comments?