Distributed storage is going to change? This is an idea that came to my mind after interviewing Edison, the co-founder and technical director of Galaxy Huaxun.
In the past, what I thought was distributed storage was explained in Baidu Encyclopedia, which stored data in multiple independent devices; it was distributed storage products of Ali Cloud, Tencent Cloud... Now, I have a new understanding of distributed storage. The concepts of BT and eMule can also be applied to the enterprise side, and the advantages are very obvious. A typical example is IPFS.
What stage of development is IPFS going through, what are its advantages, what are its shortcomings, and what is its prospect? Taking advantage of the cooperation interview between Galaxy ECCOM and Xin H3C, this article will talk about IPFS storage.
Where is IPFS strong?
To be honest, I have also heard of IPFS before, but I have not studied it carefully. After all, no one of the big giants talks about it, only a few manufacturers are promoting it. However, after getting to know it in depth this time, I really have to sweat for the traditional blockchain distributed storage method, because the advantages of IPFS are too prominent.
I summarize the characteristics of IPFS into three aspects:
1. Decentralization.
Some people may say that the distributed storage of cloud service providers is also decentralized, and data is stored in different data centers. But have you ever thought that data is actually stored in the data center of a cloud service provider, and it is essentially centralized.
The decentralization emphasized by IPFS is that data can be stored in the storage space of any network in the world, just like BT and eMule. Each node is a data source and anyone can rent it.
2. Cost performance.
The big explosion of data is an indisputable fact. The cost of mining value from data must be calculated. IPFS has lower storage costs than traditional distributed storage.
According to estimates, AWS S3 charges $25 per TB per month, but IPFS can basically do about $2.
3. Security.
Traditional distributed storage has a low safety factor. Once attacked, a large amount of data cannot be recovered in a short time. Also, due to the few data center nodes, it may cause problems such as high latency and network instability. This is why all major cloud service providers must invest a lot of capital to build Data center, optimized network.
IPFS does not have these problems. The data is encrypted and then divided into multiple nodes. Only the person with the private key can reorganize all parts to view the complete data. There are many nodes, and the recovery is fast even if there is a problem.
So, do you understand why I am nervous about traditional distributed storage? IPFS wins in multiple dimensions. That being the case, why is the development of IPFS not fast? Do you know that IPFS has been in development for 6 years from its birth to the present? What is the root cause of this?
We might as well analyze the actual situation of Galaxy China News.
What are the shortcomings?
Galaxy ECCOM is a blockchain company dedicated to providing IPFS storage services. Its goal is to promote the development of IPFS in China. In this process, it will promote and improve the IPFS protocol by building an IPFS&Filecoin ecosystem.
Galaxy Huaxun currently focuses on the highly available, ultra-stable, and scalable supercomputing cluster, as well as the automatic operation and maintenance of the system. In the future, we will continue to work on building a full set of storage solutions for B-end users in the IPFS data center, including automated operation and maintenance tools, optimal configuration solutions for machines with different configurations, and monitoring logs.
Speaking of the biggest bottleneck encountered in the development of IPFS, Edison said frankly that the upstream and downstream ecosystems are not perfect, and at the same time, due to few giants participating, the ecological construction is slow. It is for this reason that Galaxy Huaxun was also punished for equipment reliability issues.
Punishment? what happened?
Here is an extension of the IPFS consensus mechanism. Some friends may have doubts when reading the previous article. How to ensure the reliability and security of data stored in so many nodes? Cloud service providers rely on technology and reputation, what does IPFS rely on? Very simple, rely on mechanism.
According to Edison, to become a node on the chain and provide users with IPFS storage services, a part of the funds needs to be used as collateral for the service. When there is a problem with the service you provide, the chain will automatically punish the mortgaged subject matter.
Therefore, as an IPFS storage service provider, Galaxy ECCOM needs a strong and stable hardware platform as support. This needs to start with the partnership between Galaxy China News and H3C.
Why choose H3C?
In order to solve the problem of the underlying hardware, Galaxy Huaxun has actually looked for many manufacturers and compared many products, but finally chose the whole solution of Xinhua three server + storage. Why did you choose New H3C? In my opinion, there are two core elements.
1. The product dimension meets the requirements. The reliability, scalability, and quality control of H3C products are second to none in the industry, which meets the hard requirements of IPFS storage for hardware devices. Based on this, as Edison said, although the purchase price of New H3C is slightly higher than that of similar products, Galaxy Huatong still insists on choosing New H3C because of the impact of forfeiture costs, expansion costs, and uncontrollable factors.
2. Both parties have a common vision. Xin H3C has a strong desire for technological exploration. After Galaxy ECCOM describes a complete business scenario, it is willing to meet the needs of this application scenario and help Galaxy ECCOM to explore the business scenario in depth. With the help of New H3C, Galaxy ECCOM will accelerate the market development process significantly.
Edison agreed. He said that the development of IPFS has a history of 5 or 6 years, but the IPFS storage project was only launched in October this year, and it has only been two months since it has been fully paid. Galaxy Huaxun is also exploring it. In the future, in the field of IPFS, whether it is hardware or software, whether it is computing or storage, Galaxy Huaxun hopes to introduce standardized IPFS application scenarios, and this is inseparable from the support of giants like Xinhua Three.
After applying the Xin H3C X10000 distributed converged storage, the performance of Galaxy ECCOM's IPFS storage bandwidth has been increased to 4-5 times of the original system. The system has been running for more than a month and the operation status is healthy and stable. This also laid the foundation for the next cooperation between the two parties.
At this time, IPFS storage needs to speed up, and the distributed storage market may really change.
Postscript: Looking forward to a new era
IPFS is an emerging blockchain underlying storage protocol. If it weren't for this interview, I might have to delay getting to know it for a while. After learning about IPFS, I am very excited. There must be many people who hold the same view as me. Its concept is not new. It existed 20 years ago, but it is used in the enterprise market. I am afraid that many people have never thought about it.
After all, in the enterprise market, IPFS is too non-mainstream. It is destined that IPFS will not be accomplished overnight. There must be a relatively long development process. In this process, the upstream and downstream ecology will be continuously improved, and the mechanism will be continuously improved until more and more users accept it.
Fortunately, IPFS has caught up with a good time window, the state has policies, and the blockchain has been included in the “new infrastructure” hotspot construction category; the concept of cloud computing has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people; coupled with the early assistance of giants such as Xinhua Three, these Both will help shorten the market cultivation period. Therefore, it is foreseeable that IPFS will have a higher degree of popularity before long. And I also think that IPFS should have a higher degree of popularity. Looking forward to the arrival of the era of truly distributed storage.