IBM's Watson (Supercomputer)

IBM's Supercomputer Watson may head to the cloud 

IBM is looking to expand its Watson supercomputer into a cloud-based service that can be used by a variety of different types of professionals. The move could end up making IBM's supercomputer readily available for the average physician or lawyer. "We want broad exposure for Watson. We want physicians all over the planet to be able to use it," solutions marketing manager at IBM John Gordon said to New Scientist.

"And we are now looking at ways of delivering Watson as a service to make sure that it is something that is very accessible and which doesn't require a significant level of technology investment by the user."
Watson is IBM's five-year-old supercomputer. The powerful machine has the ability to shuffle through mass quantities of data and give users answers to a variety of quires. To prove Watson's answer giving prowess IBM put the supercomputer on Jeopardy last year. The supercomputer beat out former Jeopardy winners on the Alex Trebek hosted game show in January 2011.

Watson is already in use at some major firms. The supercomputer is said to be helping Citi Group make financial decisions by calculating risk-assessment portfolio's for some of the company's clients.
A move to the cloud would mean a more service-based approach for Watson. The cloud could allow 

Watson to adapt to individual user needs and learn user preferences. IBM puts forth the example of Watson giving user-based preferences for chemotherapy treatments. The company says a cloud-based Watson could learn about a patient who would prefer treatment that doesn't cause hair loss on a case-by-case basis.
As services in the cloud continue to expand its interesting to see what types of technology can grow from being part of the cloud. Companies are no longer just using the cloud for storage; they are also now building 
complete services in the ether. It will be interesting to see where the trend ends up going.

Lets just hope it doesn't wind up with SkyNet and time-traveling robots.

New Virtualization storage

Hitachi Unveils SMB Storage Array

Midrange Hitachi Unified Storage VM mixes block, file, and object storage with heterogeneous virtualization under a single management interface.

Hitachi Data Systems on Tuesday announced the Hitachi VM system, a new midrange array for small and midsized businesses (SMBs) that fits in the middle of Hitachi storage between the entry-level Hitachi Unified Storage (HUS) system and the high-end Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP).

The HUS VM is intended for use among businesses of 500 to 1,000 employees and can support as much as 4 PB of data or 64 PB of virtualized data under a single management interface. It comes in two configurations: one a controller-only version that can front-end and virtualize other vendors' arrays, and second, a version with both controller and solid state and serial attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives. Last year, Hitachi dispensed with the use of both FIbre Channel and SATA disk drives, saying that they could get more economy with the use of SAS drives. As many as 1,152 SAS drives and 128 solid state drives can be accommodated.

The HUS VM supports CIFS, NFS, Fibre Channel, and iSCSI connectivity to Ethernet and Fibre Channel SANs. It uses the same microcode as the Hitachi VSP and is managed by Hitachi Command Suite 7. Included with the HUS VM are adapters and reference architectures for use with VMware, Microsoft, and Oracle, which enable management from these platforms' management consoles and allow backup and recovery from them as well. Reference architectures for SAP and virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI) are also included.

Each controller in the HUS VM is actually dual, sharing up to 256 GB of cache memory. The 5U controller can support as many as 60 TB logical unit numbers (LUNs). The file module is 3U high and contains 32 GB of cache memory for each of its four clustered nodes. A total of 128 file systems support a maximum size of 256 TB. The array has 32, 8-Gbps Fibre Channel connections and connects to storage with 6-Gbps SAS. In addition, Hitachi offers a 100% availability guarantee with the HUS VM and, according to company claims, the HUS VM offers data migration 90% faster than competitive systems.

The HUS VM controller only version starts at $156,000.

New storage technology..(Quartz Glass)

Good to welcome this invention

Hitachi is showing off a storage system using quartz glass that it claims will retain data for hundred of millions of years. 
Company researchers displayed the storage unit, consisting of a sliver of glass 2cm square and 2mm thick, which can hold 40MB of data per square inch, about the same as a standard CD. The data is written in binary format by lasering dots on the glass in four layers, but the researchers say adding more layers to increase storage density isn't a problem.
"The volume of data being created every day is exploding, but in terms of keeping it for later generations, we haven't necessarily improved since the days we inscribed things on stones," Hitachi researcher Kazuyoshi Torii told AFP. "The possibility of losing information may actually have increased," he said, pointing out that CDs and tape storage are predicted to last less than a few decades at best, and in many cases fail within years.
The glass has been shown to retain its data undamaged after being heated to 1,000° Celsius (1,832° Fahrenheit) for over two hours, and is impervious to radiation, water, and most forms of chemicals. Hitachi said the data could conceivably be retrievable hundreds of millions of years in the future.
"We believe data will survive unless this hard glass is broken," said senior researcher Takao Watanabe.

Let's see how to retrieve the stored data

Storing the data is one thing, but reading it is quite another. The researchers say, however, that as it is stored in a simple binary format, actually retrieving the data should be possible for future civilizations as the dots can be read using a simple microscope.
The problem of writing and reading future storage mediums isn't new. NASA's golden record, a disc containing images and sounds from Earth that went out with the Voyager 1 and 2 probes, was shipped with a stylus and cartridge, along with pictorial references showing how to play it and a cover showing Earth's location.
Aliens reading our data might seem inconceivable, but if the glass storage really does last for a hundred million years, it's possible that mankind may not be around to read it either. A paper by Cornell University suggests the average lifespan of a species on Earth is around 10 million years, and given the way humans are fouling their own nest it could be up to the whatever evolves from bees, ants, or dolphins to figure out what these glass things are.