I read an article a while back on Finland’s use of blockchain technology to provide bank accounts and identity services to immigrants (see MIT TechReview article about Finland).
Blockchains were originally invented as a way of supporting financial transactions outside the current, government monitored, financial marketplace. With Finland’s experiment, the government is starting to use blockchains to support the unbanked and monitoring their financial activity – go figure.
Debit cards on blockchain
Finland’s using a Helsinki based startup MONI, to assign a MONI card, essentially a prepaid MasterCard, to all immigrants. An immigrant can use their MONI card to pay for anything online or in real life, use it as a direct deposit account or to receive and track the use of government assistance.
Underlying the MONI card is public blockchain technology. That is MONI is not using normal credit card services to support it’s bank accounts, MONI money transfers are done through the use of public blockchains.
MONI accounts are essentially (crypto currency) wallets but used as a debit card. The user merely enters a series of numbers into web forms or uses their MONI card at a credit card terminals throughout Europe. Transferring money between MONI users anywhere in the World is also free and instantaneous.
Finland also sees an immutable record of all immigrant financial transactions, that can be monitored to track immigrant (financial) integration into the country.
MONI is intending to make this service more broadly available. A MONI card account costs €2/month and MONI take’s a small cut out of each monetary transaction.
IDs on blockchain
I read another article the other day “Microsoft to implement blockchain-based ID system” in CoinTelegraph about using blockchains as a universal digital ID.
India has over the last decade, implemented a digital government ID using biometrics (see Aadhaar wikipedia article). Other countries have been moving to e-government where use of government services is implemented over the Internet (see EU article on eGovernment in Lithuania). Such eGovernment services depend on a digitized population registry.
Although it’s unclear whether Aadhaar and Lithuania make use of blockchain technology for their ID services, Microsoft’s definitely looking to blockchains to provide unique accounts/digital IDs to it’s population of users.
User signon’s has been a prevalent problem of the web for years. Each and every web and mobile App requires a person to signon to personalize their App. Nowadays, many Apps support using Google ID or Facebook ID for a single signon and there are other technologies being offered that provide similar services. Using a blockchain ID could easily support a single signon service.
The blockchain ID (wallet) public key could easily be used to encrypt an authentication transaction, identifying the App and the user. This authentication transaction would be processed by the blockchain digital ID service would use the private key to decrypt the transaction and use a backend ID App repository for the user to check to see that the user loging in, is the person that opened the account, acting as a sort of “proof of who you are”
Storage on blockchain
Filecoin and StorJ are storage providers that use blockchain services to allow others to use your local (or networked) storage to provide storage to the world.
A while back I had written about (free) peer to peer storage and compute services (see my Free P2P cloud storage … post). But the problem was how do people benefit from hosting the P2P storage or compute. Filecoin and Storj solved this by paying in cryptocurrencies for storage hosted on your hardware.
Filecoin offers a storage auction and hosting service that anyone worldwide can log into and use. The data stored is encrypted end-to-end so that no one can see what’s being stored and the data is also erasure coded so that it is protected and accessible even with having one or more hosting sites be offline.
Filecoin uses “proofs of storage“, “proofs of space”, “proofs of data possession“, and “proofs of retrievability” as a way to guarantee their storage service works properly. They also use chained “proofs of replication” as “proofs of spacetime” as service validation checks. Proofs of Replication are a way of insuring that storage providers are not deduplicating data copies and charging for non-deduped storage. (See Filecoin’s Proof of Replication paper for more info).
Storj looks somewhat similar to Filecoin, but without as much sophistication behind it.
Compute on blockchain
Ethereum was invented to support smart contracts that run on blockchain technology. IBM’s HyperLegder OpenLedger project (see our GreyBeardsOnStorga Podcast and RayOnStorage post on Hyperledger) is another example.
Smart contracts are essentially applications that run in a blockchains virtualized environment. Blockchain services are used to run an application and validate that’s it’s run only once. In some cases smart contracts use external oracles to query as a way to verify something or some action has occurred outside the blockchain. Other oracles can be entirely digital entities that check on a particular commodity price, weather pattern, account value, etc. The oracle becomes a critical step in determining the go no go status of a smartcontract.
Advertisements vs. crypto mining
Salon, a news providing website, offers readers an option to see advertisements or to allow Salon to use their computer (browser) to mine crypto coins. (See Salon offers… article in CoinDesk).
I believe this offer is made when the website detects a viewer is using ad blockers.
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Tthe trend is clear, people, organizations and even governments are looking at blockchain technology to provide basic and advanced services around the world.
If anyone would is interested in providing a pre-paid Visa card via blockchains, please contact me. I’d like to help.
Now if I could just find my GPU’s at a decent price somewhere…
Speaking of advertising… RayOnStorage doesn’t use advertising. But blogging like this takes time and money. If anyone’s interested in helping fund this blog, please consider sending some BTC our way, even 0.0001 BTC would help.
Our BTC wallet address is:
1MqBbAvMo6QbCVD6ZwtbLaPxmcUZGj9Ghw
Photo Credit(s): Blockchain and the public sector on OpenGovAsia.com
Unleash your design teams with single signon on Unifilabs.com
Understanding the difference between P2P and Client-server networks on LinkedIN
I was at Dell EMC World2017 last week and although most of the news was on Dell’s new 14th generation server and Dell-EMC integration progress, Wednesday’s keynote was devoted to storage and non-server infrastructure news.
Dell EMC Data Domain Cloud DR (DDCDR) is a new capability that enables DD to backup to AWS S3 object storage and when needed restart the virtual machines within AWS.
Once the OVA is installed, it will read the changed data and will segment, encrypt, and compress the backup data and then send this and the backup metadata to AWS S3 objects. Avamar/DD policies can be established to control how many daily backup copies are to be saved to S3 object storage. There’s no need for Data Domain or Avamar to run in AWS.
When there’s a problem at the primary data center, an admin can click on a Avamar GUI button and have the Cloud DR server, uncompress, decrypt, rehydrate and restore the backup data into EBS volumes, translate the VMware VM image to an AMI image and then restarts the AMI on an AWS virtual server (EC2) with its data on EBS volume storage. The Cloud DR server will use the backup metadata to select the AWS EC2 instance with the proper CPU and RAM needed to run the application. Once this completes, the VM is running standalone, in an AWS EC2 instance. Presumably, you have to have EC2 and EBS storage volumes resources available under your AWS domain to be able to install the application and restore its data.
For simplicity purposes, the user can control almost all of the required functionality for DDCDR from the Avamar GUI alone. But in case of a site outage, the user can initiate the application DR from a portal supplied by the Cloud DR server utility.
There was much more infrastructure news at Dell EMC World2017. I’ll discuss more details on their new storage offerings in my upcoming Storage Intelligence newsletter, due out the end of this month. If your interested in receiving your own copy of my newsletter, checkout the signup button in the upper right of this page.
At 
Elastifile’s architecture supports accessor, owner and data nodes. But these can all be colocated on the same server or segregated across different servers.
Metadata operations are persisted via journaled transactions and which are distributed across the cluster. For instance the journal entries for a mapping data object updates are written to the same file data object (OID) as the actual file data, the 4KB compressed data object.
There’s plenty of discussion on how they manage consistency for their metadata across cluster nodes. Elastifile invented and use Bizur, a key-value consensus based DB. Their chief architect Ezra Hoch (
Earlier this week I attended Hitachi Summit 2016 along with a number of other analysts and Hitachi executives where Hitachi discussed their current and ongoing focus on the IoT (Internet of Things) business.
Hitachi has been in the OT (Operational [industrial] Technology) business for over a century now. Hitachi has also had a very successful and ongoing IT business (Hitachi Data Systems) for decades now. Their main competitors in this IoT business are GE and Siemans but neither have the extensive history in IT that Hitachi has had. But both are working hard to catchup.
For one example of what Hitachi is doing in IoT, they have recently won a 27.5 year Rail-as-a-Service contract to upgrade, ticket, maintain and manage all new trains for UK Rail. This entails upgrading all train rolling stock, provide upgraded rail signaling, traffic management systems, depot and station equipment and ticketing services for all of UK Rail.
The success and profitability of this Hitachi service offering hinges on their ability to provide more cost efficient rail transport. A key capability they plan to deliver is predictive maintenance.
Hitachi said their new trains capture 48K data items and generate over ~25GB/train/day. All this data, will be fed into their new Hitachi Insight Group Lumada platform which includes Pentaho, HSDP (Hitachi Streaming Data Platform) and their Content Analytics to analyze train data and determine how best to keep the trains running. Behind all this analytical power will no doubt be HDS HCP object store used to keep track of all the train sensor data and other information, Hitachi UCP servers to process it all, and other Hitachi software and hardware to glue it all together.
NetApp announced a new version of their object storage solution, the 
Somewhere during Bycast’s journey they developed support for tape archives and information lifecycle management (ILM) for objects. The previous generation, StorageGrid 10.2 had a number of features, including:
But customers complained StorageGRID was too complex to install and update which required too much hand holding by NetApp professional services. StorageGRID Webscale 10.3 was targeted to address these deficiencies. Some of the features in StorageGrid 10.3, include:
ILM policy change predictions/modeling, so that admins can now see how changes to ILM policies will impact StorageGRID.
Apparently, service providers are adopting object storage to provide competition to AWS, Azure and Google cloud storage for backup and storage archives as well as for DR as a service. Also, many media and other customers managing massive data repositories are turning to object storage to support their multi-site, very large file libraries. And as more solution vendors support S3 object protocols for data access and archive, something like StorageGRID can become their onsite-offsite storage alternative.
Everyone wants to minimize cloud vendor lockin but that’s not possible today except in a few special cases (NetApp Private Storage and similar capabilities from other vendors, cloud storage gateway services, cloud archive services, etc.).
We talked with