Storage Solutions for Big Data Systems: A Qualitative Study and Comparison

Big data systems development is full of challenges in view of the variety of application areas and domains that this technology promises to serve. Typically, fundamental design decisions involved in big data systems design include choosing appropriate storage and computing infrastructures. In this age of heterogeneous systems that integrate different technologies for optimized solution to a specific real world problem, big data system are not an exception to any such rule. As far as the storage aspect of any big data system is concerned, the primary facet in this regard is a storage infrastructure and NoSQL seems to be the right technology that fulfills its requirements. However, every big data application has variable data characteristics and thus, the corresponding data fits into a different data model. This paper presents feature and use case analysis and comparison of the four main data models namely document oriented, key value, graph and wide column. Moreover, a feature analysis of 80 NoSQL solutions has been provided, elaborating on the criteria and points that a developer must consider while making a possible choice. Typically, big data storage needs to communicate with the execution engine and other processing and visualization technologies to create a comprehensive solution. This brings forth second facet of big data storage, big data file formats, into picture. The second half of the research paper compares the advantages, shortcomings and possible use cases of available big data file formats for Hadoop, which is the foundation for most big data computing technologies. Decentralized storage and blockchain are seen as the next generation of big data storage and its challenges and future prospects have also been discussed

MOON: MapReduce On Opportunistic eNvironments

Abstract—MapReduce offers a flexible programming model for processing and generating large data sets on dedicated resources, where only a small fraction of such resources are every unavailable at any given time. In contrast, when MapReduce is run on volunteer computing systems, which opportunistically harness idle desktop computers via frameworks like Condor, it results in poor performance due to the volatility of the resources, in particular, the high rate of node unavailability. Specifically, the data and task replication scheme adopted by existing MapReduce implementations is woefully inadequate for resources with high unavailability. To address this, we propose MOON, short for MapReduce On Opportunistic eNvironments. MOON extends Hadoop, an open-source implementation of MapReduce, with adaptive task and data scheduling algorithms in order to offer reliable MapReduce services on a hybrid resource architecture, where volunteer computing systems are supplemented by a small set of dedicated nodes. The adaptive task and data scheduling algorithms in MOON distinguish between (1) different types of MapReduce data and (2) different types of node outages in order to strategically place tasks and data on both volatile and dedicated nodes. Our tests demonstrate that MOON can deliver a 3-fold performance improvement to Hadoop in volatile, volunteer computing environments

Modeling and Evaluation of Multisource Streaming Strategies in P2P VoD Systems

In recent years, multimedia content distribution has largely been moved to the Internet, inducing broadcasters, operators and service providers to upgrade with large expenses their infrastructures. In this context, streaming solutions that rely on user devices such as set-top boxes (STBs) to offload dedicated streaming servers are particularly appropriate. In these systems, contents are usually replicated and scattered over the network established by STBs placed at users' home, and the video-on-demand (VoD) service is provisioned through streaming sessions established among neighboring STBs following a Peer-to-Peer fashion. Up to now the majority of research works have focused on the design and optimization of content replicas mechanisms to minimize server costs. The optimization of replicas mechanisms has been typically performed either considering very crude system performance indicators or analyzing asymptotic behavior. In this work, instead, we propose an analytical model that complements previous works providing fairly accurate predictions of system performance (i.e., blocking probability). Our model turns out to be a highly scalable, flexible, and extensible tool that may be helpful both for designers and developers to efficiently predict the effect of system design choices in large scale STB-VoD system