Data storage elasticity – quick view on master thesis work (part 1)

Master Theses

In this post I would like to speak about two master theses that EURA NOVA is managing with the Faculty of Science Engineering of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and with the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL).  The two students have been working on the same topic: the elasticity of  data storage on the cloud.  The first cool stuff to notice is that they are working on two different aspects of the elasticity by taking different directions, but at the end of the day, by their two contributions they draw a complete picture of the NoSQL benchmarking in the cloud. In this post I will give you a preview of their work that should be published in June 2011.

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Convergence between Cloud Infrastructure management and Data Centre management

The convergence – a reality

If we look at the evolution of private cloud, we can clearly see a natural convergence between Data Center Management (DCM) and IaaS management. It is natural because it fits better to the enterprise organization. Let’s be clear, we are talking about large organization, having already data centers for their own IT or businesses. The Services and software department are focusing on the elastic applications they can build on top of the infrastructure management such as Eucalyptus [1], OpenStack[2] or commercial solutions such as VCloud Director [3].

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Measuring elasticity for cloud databases

The rise of the Internet and the multiplication of data sources have multiplied the number of “Bigdata” storage problems. These data sets are not only very big but also tend to grow very fast, sometimes in a short period. Distributed databases that work well for such data sets need to be not only scalable but also elastic to ensure a fast response to growth in demand of computing power or storage. The goal of this article is to present measurement results that characterize the elasticity of three databases. We have chosen Cassandra, HBase, and mongoDB as three representative popular horizontally scalable NoSQL databases that are in production use. We have made measurements under realistic loads up to 48 nodes, using the Wikipedia database to create our dataset and using the Rackspace cloud infrastructure. We define precisely our methodology and we introduce a new dimensionless measure for elasticity to allow uniform comparisons of different databases at different scales. Our results show clearly that the technical choices taken by the databases have a strong impact on the way they react when new nodes are added to the clusters.

Thibault Dory, Boris Mejías, Peter Van Roy, and Nam-Luc Tran, Measuring Elasticity for Cloud Databases, proceedings of the Cloud Computing 2011 (Second International Conference on Cloud Computing, GRIDs, and Virtualization), Rome, Italy, September 2011.

Click here to access the paper.

Replacing Pig Latin’s storage engine

Today, we welcome Arthur Lessuise, a student in last year in Master in Computer Science at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). He spent 6 weeks at Euranova R&D for its internship. He studied the ability to swap HDFS in Pig Latin by a NoSQL storage. This post is a summary of his amazing work. Enjoy!

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Eclipse Build Technologies: What are the Current Trends?

I recently had the opportunity to attend the symposium entitled “What’s in a build? Best practice and Requirements” given by Henrik Lindberg (Cloudsmith [1]) and Nick Boldt (JBoss – RedHat [2]) at the Eclipse Summit Europe 2010 in Ludwigsburg [3]. The goal was to brainstorm and discuss about the practices and current concerns when it comes to the build of Eclipse plug-ins, features or RCP applications, and the automatic execution of post-build processes such as testing.

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ESE 2010: EMF Symposium – overview

This Tuesday 2nd of November, the Eclipse Symposium opened the first afternoon of the ESE 2010 [1]. In this post we will give you an sightsee of the emergent projects presented during the session.  The EMF symposium is mainly focus around demos of new projects and initiatives in the modeling world. Going further it gives an overview of the important projects and the next directions of the modeling projects.

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New SQL RDBMS Architectures Vs Old ones Vs NoSQL

Those recent years we have seen the NoSQL initiative emerging against the so-called “old, slow and legacy” relational DBs. But today the debate is extending with a newcomer “The New RDMS architecture”. The concept is simple, the RDMS architecture was developed a long time ago, at that time computer science,  computers and processors were extremely different from what we can find today. Why are we not able to gather the recent researches in storage, distributed computing and threading system to re-design a modern RDMS?

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RH Partner summit: full-speed, all in the same direction toward cloud

During my career, I have seen a lot of companies, especially multi-national companies, being disrupted by internal wars, arguments between departments, jealousy between projects and much more that you can imagine. What’s really impressive after one day assisting at the Red Hat partner summit conferences, is the clear vision, direction and alignment of the whole Red Hat products and projects in the same and unique direction: enterprise, data-centre and cloud.

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Red Hat EMEA Partner summit 2010 Keynote

Sunday 2nd of May, Euranova is at Valencia, Spain, for the Red Hat EMEA partner summit. The ceremony was opened by Jim Whitehurst, the Red Hat CEO in a keynote on the open source opportunity. The key message in the keynote was that every three years we can see an inflexion point in IT, in which business models, technologies and the delivery model completely change. In these last years we have seen this inflexion and arrival of virtualization, cloud and social networking. This keynote described how this point influences the IT and how it brings new challenges. The keynote was organized in three sections: (1) the problem, (2) The Red Hat business and (3) The solution.

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