"It looks like Mellanox has a lot more driver support," he says. "The stuff from IBM is kind of like, you can run test tools and stuff, but support for SDP [Sockets Direct Protocol] is coming from IBM in the next few weeks."
UW's DigitalWell uses proprietary hierarchical storage management (HSM) software, which the university developed with Sandia National Laboratories. The system can serve on-demand MPEG2 video streams at up to 5.6 Mbit/s over IP, although to access the data at those speeds users must be connected via the high-speed Internet2 network.
Various University of Washington groups and others are using DigitalWell for storing massive amounts of media. For example, UWTV, the university's television channel, hosts 1,500 hours of on-demand video content on the system.
The HSM software provides a way to stream videos from the StorageTek tape libraries with only about a 13-second delay, using direct-attached tape-caching servers. In addition, DigitalWell includes 5 Tbytes of Isilon Systems's NAS storage and 5 Tbytes of RAID arrays from Rorke Data Inc. connected to Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) Fibre Channel switches.
McQueen says UW is beta-testing the Isilon NAS system, which is specifically designed for streaming media, and so far he's impressed with it (see Isilon Is-a-Rich and Isilon Dives Into NAS Pool).
To realize the benefits of cloud-native software, an application must actually be cloud-native—designed to run in the cloud, interacting with disaggregated cloud services, fully manageable as code—to deliver the expected benefits.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
