[okfn-discuss] Honeycomb2 storage gets GPL'd

Thu Sep 16 17:54:28 BST 2010

Honeycomb2 -> smart storage well suited for archiving and curation of
data - now under a GPL2 licence:

http://www.tierracloud.com/company/press_release/august_31.html

>From a former life working on digital library archives at Oxford, I've
done some work with these people and met up with them on a number of
occasions. They are venture capital backed, but they have been open in
talks and they have open sourced their stack.

My opinion of it is that the underlying scattering and data-doctoring
tech is really great (tech which I hope made the GPL cut... patent
issues :(). Runs on normal servers in clusters, with the ability to put
your own apps on there to roam amongst the data - similar in notion to
iRods, but a different kettle of fish.

About HC2:

==========================

The key benefits of HC2 are:

Advanced open-source object-store that runs on x86 servers: In addition
to being much less expensive than proprietary hardware, this allows
customers to choose best-of-breed hardware that meets their unique
requirements.

Automated data management: Even though there have been a number of
substantial improvements to external block and file storage, storage
management practices are more or less constant since their advent. With
innovations in the areas of load balancing, self-healing, programmatic
APIs, meta-data, data integrity guarantees, immutability, flat
name-space and single management entity, HC2 promises to automate or
simplify storage management operations stable since the 80s.

Extreme Data Mobility: A storage system built using HC2 has two levels
of hierarchies. Multiple storage nodes make up a cell, and multiple
cells make up a hive. The architecture allows for heterogeneous cells
that are geographically separated thus allowing operations such as
cloud-bursting, ILM, geographic replication, dispersal (community cloud
storage).

Ability to run 3rd Party Storage Apps: Storage apps are light weight
applications that operate on the data e.g. long term data integrity
checking (built-in app called “Data Doctor”), transcoding, virus scans,
search, format conversions, equivalency check, meta-data extraction etc.
The HC2 architecture allows for 3rd party storage apps. A combination of
HC2 plus 3rd party apps promises to exceed the functionality of any
proprietary solution available.

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