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With Stephen Wynkoop
So much data, so many databases…to the moon! Cloud exit strategies, cloud security considerations, wireless access to data… Jeopardy!(tm) ….and the SSWUG Virtual Conference, Bus. Intelligence Upgrade hesitations and much more.
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Web Scale Data Storage Failover
Yesterday I talked about some of the differences between most Web Scale data storage solutions. I came across a rather rude cartoon where developers were arguing about Web Scale. One character was reviewing all the capabilities of a modern RDBMS. The other character would simply reply, “yes, but is it Web Scale?”
To set the stage, most Web Scale storage engines simply store data as a key value pair. The key helps you find the data you seek; the value is anything you need to persist. It can be a whole object serialized in an XML or binary form. It can be a file, or a pointer to a file. It is up to the developer to determine what will be stored.
This is very fast storage, hence the term Web Scale. But what about backups, failover, ACID, transactions, etc? Well, that’s available, but not necessarily part of the native engine.
A great example of Web Scale with redundancy and recovery is the Cloud IQ Storage from Appistry. Appistry has taken the hadoop engine and wrapped it in their distributed server solution resulting in failover while maintaining the Web Scale performance.
When you think about it, that is pretty much what the SQL Server engine does at it’s core. It provides services for persisting, retrieving and failing over data. Appistry does a similar thing, except it operates on more than a single machine.
Granted, Appistry does not resolve all the issues such as ACID or transactions. However, with a distributed product like Cloud IQ Storage, backups may not even be required; you could simply configure an application fabric to run in multiple locations.
Share your feedback. Drop me a note at facebook, twitter, or email at btaylor@sswug.org with your concerns, future plans or current successes using distributed storage. I’d really like to hear about your experiences with other non-rdbms experiences in the cloud.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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