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MIT researchers have modified solid-state drives (SSDs), which use flash storage, to process key-value pairs to cut in half the energy and space required to store and manage user data. Advance boosts efficiency of flash storage in data centers New architecture promises to cut in half the energy and physical space required to store and manage user data. Data centers are server farms that facilitate communication between users and web services, and are some of the most energy-consuming facilities in the world.

Ever since we launched Magic Pocket, our in-house multi-exabyte storage system, we’ve been continuously looking for opportunities to improve efficiency, while maintaining our high standards for reliability. Last year, we pushed the limits of storage density by being the first major tech company to adopt SMR storage. In this post, we’ll discuss another advance in storage technology at Dropbox: a new cold storage tier that’s optimized for less frequently accessed data.

The Kubernetes implementation of the Container Storage Interface (CSI) has been promoted to GA in the Kubernetes v1.13 release. Support for CSI was introduced as alpha in Kubernetes v1.9 release, and promoted to beta in the Kubernetes v1.10 release. The GA milestone indicates that Kubernetes users may depend on the feature and its API without fear of backwards incompatible changes in future causing regressions. GA features are protected by the Kubernetes deprecation policy.

Earlier this month my colleague Bala Thekkedath published a story about Extreme Scale HPC and talked about how AWS customer Western Digital built a cloud-scale HPC cluster on AWS and used it to simulate crucial elements of upcoming head designs for their next-generation hard disk drives (HDD). The simulation described in the story encompassed a little over 2.5 million tasks, and ran to completion in just 8 hours on a million-vCPU Amazon EC2 cluster.