SSD is common for VPS and PaaS virtual machines for higher I/O performance. Now, it is coming to shared hosting too. DreamHost states that “Now with solid state drives (SSDs), our standard web hosting loads pages 200% faster”. We ourselves are happy to know this performance improvement with the price kept the same. Good work,
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Tag: Storage
Making GPT Partition Table and Creating Partitions Using parted in Linux
Posted onMy best favorite disk partition table manipulation tools are cfdisk/fdisk on Linux. However, for large disks, cfdisk/fdisk (of the versions by this post is written) will just give up with a message suggesting GPT partition table format and using GNU parted like WARNING: The size of this disk is 6.0 TB (6001042391040 bytes). DOS partition
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Hadoop Installation Tutorial (Hadoop 2.x)
Posted onHadoop 2 or YARN is the new version of Hadoop. It adds the yarn resource manager in addition to the HDFS and MapReduce components. Hadoop MapReduce is a programming model and software framework for writing applications, which is an open-source variant of MapReduce designed and implemented by Google initially for processing and generating large data
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RAII-like Error Handling and Resource Management in C
Posted onError handling and resource management are pervasive in programs. RAII originated in C++ is great. With RAII, it is much easier to write easy-to-read code that allocats/deallocats resources in the constructor/destructors. By representing a resource with a local object, we are sure that local object’s destructor will release the resource and will not forget to
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Data Consistency Models of Public Cloud Storage Services: Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage and Windows Azure Storage
Posted onThe public cloud storage services like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage and Windows Azure Storage replicate the data to ensure high availability. On the other hand, with data being replicated, the storage services exhibits certain data consistency models. Different cloud service providers employ different data consistency models nowadays. In this post, we survey the data
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Favorite Sayings by John Ousterhout – Precious Experience and Advice for Building Systems
Posted onJohn Ousterhout is a professor of Deparment of Computer Science from Stanford University. One recent project he is working on is the RAMCloud, a “new class of storage, based entirely in DRAM, that is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than existing storage systems”. He posts his “Favorite Sayings” on his homepage. These sayings are precious
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How To Mount Google Drive on Linux
Posted onGoogle Drive is nice cloud storage which provide document editing features. However, it does not yet provide a Linux client. I find a good third party tool that works with Google Drive on Linux very well: google-drive-ocamlfuse. The website of google-drive-ocamlfuse provides easy to follow instructions to install it. In this tutorial, we show a
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Setting Up LVM Backed Xen DomU
Posted onLVM volumes as backing for DomU’s file system is an appealing solution to Xen VBD. LVM volumes can dynamically grow/shrink and snapshot. These features make it simple and fast to duplicate DomU and adding storage to DomU. Creating LVM-backed Xen DomU is introduced in this post. Create LVM-backed VBD Suppose we have a LVM volume
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Duplicating LVM Backed Xen DomU
Posted onLVM’s snapshot feature enables us to duplicate an LVM backed Xen DomU in seconds rather than minutes. We no longer need to copy the entire file system image like backing up file backed Xen DomU. We just need to make a snapshot of the current Xen DomU in seconds. When there are changes to the
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Linux Cluster Solutions
Posted onSolutions to Linux cluster construction and management such as unified account management, NFS home directory, network configurations are summarised in this post. The post is keeping updating while new solutions is added to this site. ===Account and storage management=== [[unified-linux-login-and-home-directory-using-openldap-and-nfsautomount|Unified Linux Login and Home Directory Using OpenLDAP and NFS/automount]] [[backup-linux-home-directory-using-rsync|Backup Linux Home Directory Using rsync]]
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Setting up Stable Xen Dom0 with Fedora: Xen 3.4.3 with Xenified Linux Kernel 2.6.32.13 in Fedora 12
Posted onThis is the latest stable and recommended stable Xen Dom0 solution on Fedora 12. No serious bug found till now and we will fix the bugs by ourselves if some appears. It also works on Fedora 14 as well. It should not be hard to use this solution on other versions of Fedora or other
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Set up and Run Linux Xen Dom0 and DomU VMs
Posted onThe Xen solutions including installing and configuring Dom0 and DomU are summarized here. LVM volumes as backing for DomU’s file system is an appealing solution to Xen VBD. LVM volumes can dynamically grow/shrink and snapshot. These features make it simple and fast to duplicate DomU and adding storage to DomU. LVM backed DomU is recommended.
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Storage Architecture and Challenges by Andrew Fikes at Google Faculty Summit 2010
Posted onStorage Architecture and Challenges in Faculty Summit, July 29, 2010, by Andrew Fikes, Principal Engineer. Download PDF (from archive.org). This slides introduces some of Google’s storage systems with insights and discussion of problems.
Large-scale Data Storage and Processing System in Datacenters
Posted onResearch on Cloud Computing has made big progresses and many excellent large-scale systems have been designed in recent years. I compiled a list of some large-scale data storage and processing systems in datacenters as follows. Storage systems Google File System (GFS): http://research.google.com/archive/gfs.html HDFS implementation: https://hadoop.apache.org/docs/r2.7.2/hadoop-project-dist/hadoop-hdfs/HdfsDesign.html Colossus (GFS2): Colossus: Successor to the Google File System (GFS)
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Microsofts Cosmos Service
Posted onCosmos is “Microsoft’s internal data storage/query system for analyzing enormous amounts (as in petabytes) of data”. There is no paper/technical report about Cosmos published yet. I compiled a list of information about Cosmos on the Web as follows. What is Microsoft’s Cosmos service? by Yaron Y. Goland. Microsoft Cosmos: Petabytes perfectly processed perfunctorily by Seth
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Colossus: Successor to the Google File System (GFS)
Posted onColossus is the successor to the Google File System (GFS) as mentioned in the paper on Spanner at OSDI 2012. Colossus is also used by spanner to store its tablets. The information about Colossus is slim compared with GFS which is published in the paper at SOSP 2003. There is still some information about Colossus
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Conference Ranking by Average Number of Citations in the Last 5 Years, 2012
Posted onI am trying to find out the top conferences that have the largest average number of citations in the last 5 years on the Internet but fail to find one. However, there are many rankings about the overall citations and numbers of publications. Hence, it is not hard to calculate the average number of citations
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Reading List for Distributed Systems and Cloud Computing
Posted onUnderstanding the literature is usually the first step to do research, which is the same for systems research on cloud computing. A reading list may help a lot to those that just start in cloud computing research. Prof. Lin Gu, my PhD supervisor, compiled a reading list for system research on cloud computing. The reading
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Conferences on Cloud Computing 2013
Posted onThis post lists important conferences related to Cloud Computing in year 2013. SOSP 2013 SOSP’13: The 24th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. November 3-6, 2013, Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, Pennsylvania. The biennial ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles is the world’s premier forum for researchers, developers, programmers, and teachers of computer systems technology. Academic and
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Conferences on Cloud Computing 2012
Posted onThis post lists important conferences on Cloud Computing in year 2012. OSDI 2012 10th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI ’12) October 8–10, 2012, Hollywood, CA “The tenth OSDI seeks to present innovative, exciting research in computer systems. OSDI brings together professionals from academic and industrial backgrounds in what has become a
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