tytso

Apr 18 2009

Bits and Bytes .. on a disk

Armijn asked me to spread the news about the upcoming NLUUG Voorjaarsconference that will as usually take place in EDE.


Every bit counts. From a single byte to billions of images, from one line of text to a gigantic tangled semantic web of documents, from clay tablets to 3D holographic memory, storage and the means to organize storage have always been important to humanity. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes, it was said; a sailboat crossing the Atlantic still manages rates of a little over 1GB/s end-to-end.


A petabyte of storage weighs about as much as a small car, but a large physics experiment can fill that up in less than a week. The modern rate of data production and amount of data storage --and crucially also data search and retrieval-- have pushed the limits of computer storage and the traditional file system further and further back.


The NLUUG Spring Conference 2009 focuses on storage and the means to organise it: file systems, physical storage, connections and search. The keynote speaker at the conference will be Ted Ts'o, author of the ext4 file system in Linux and CTO of the Linux Foundation. Other subjects at the conference are DRBD, desktop search and ZFS.
The conference is in conference center 'De Reehorst' in Ede, The Netherlands. Information about the full programme and registration can be found at the conference website


As always members of NLUUG and sister organisations as well as students get a hefty discount.