How cloud storage could catch up with big data - By John Moore -
Apr 17, 2012 Cloud computing has managed to make the world’s
already colossal appetite for data storage even more voracious.
Last year, IDC, an IT market research firm, cited public cloud-
based service providers, from Amazon Web Services to YouTube, as
the most significant drivers of storage consumption in the past
three years. The government sector contributes as well: IDC
noted that the private clouds of government and research sites
compare in scope and complexity to their public cloud
counterparts. The so-called big data problem has surfaced in the
past two years to rank among the primary IT challenges.
Technologies such as the Apache Hadoop distributed computing
framework and NoSQL databases have emerged to take on the
challenge of very large — and unwieldy — datasets. And now
another technology, already at work behind the scenes, could
grow in importance in the coming years. Erasure coding has been
around since the 1980s, but until recentl