Separating cloud computing and cloud storage
In the early stage of the Internet, the relationship between computing and storage was inseparable. With the universal adoption of 5G technology in recent years, the call for separating computing from storage and high-speed network interaction has become increasingly prominent. However, the actual demand remains rarely explored.
To tap into the potential, a redefinition of key concepts are needed. The memory and cache stored in the calculation process can be redefined as computing, while persistent storage on hard drives and cloud drives can be summarized as storage. The actual transformation only occurs in a problem-focused and result-oriented approach to the separation of computing and storage.
In the era of blockchain, our endeavours will not stop there. The decoupling of blockchain and storage layer in the Web3.0 era will be a new direction for separating computing from storage.
Decoupling blockchain and storage layer
Necessity of separating blockchain and storage layer
Computing and storage separation is not new. As early as 20 years ago, the concept existed in the NAS-network-attached storage. It is essentially an Ethernet file server using TCP/IP protocol to achieve “mobile storage to computing”. However, due to the hefty cost of NAS, it is rather difficult to scale. Google has conjured the coupling of computing and storage, a major breakthrough in “mobile computing to storage”.
However, the network speed then underserved our demands. With technological advancements, our connection speed is accelerating. The technical bottleneck is no longer the speed of our network but that of the storage disk I/O. The shortcomings of integrated computing and storage in the architecture have been gradually exposed. With the increasingly exposed weaknesses and the incremental network speed, a separation of computing and storage is needed to develop architecture.
Nowadays, further improvements have been made in storage technology. With the blessings of blockchain, the concept of shared storage has begun to blossom. Focusing on the storage layer, it is the backbone of blockchain technology, two main features have become available: secure data storage and account/data access.
This is the most critical technology in blockchain architecture. The immutability and permanent features of the blockchain are embedded in the write-once read-only databases consisting of data blocks. The loading cost and data access speed will also increase with the growing amount of data. Also, most technologies use keys to manage data security. The loss of keys will result in missing data. The mainstream PoW consensus mechanism network also has many problems, such as slow loading speed. All problems can be seen as computational problems.
Lessons from our experience in the Web2.0 era remind us that we must decouple the storage layer from the blockchain, reducing the storage cost to accelerate the progress of the Web3.0 era.
Tiered data storage
In the early days of blockchain technology, these problems could not be avoided, as obstacles exist in the decoupling of computing and storage. Change is only possible with technological breakthroughs. This reiterates the significance of blockchain and storage layer decoupling. This problem can only be resolved in the entire blockchain industry by tiered data storage through a dedicated decentralized storage system MEFS featuring efficiency, safety, and high availability.
Due to the immutability and consensus of the blockchain, a consensus is generated once the data is written in any data-storing blockchain and synchronized to thousands of nodes on the chain. This process will cause seconds or minutes of pause and generate high data redundancy, significantly reducing the blockchain access performance and remaining storage space. This is the drawback of the coupled blockchain and storage layer in most decentralized storage projects.
Unlike traditional decentralized storage, the MEFS decentralized file storage system is enabled by blockchain technology as the underlying logic is based on the blockchain plus decentralized storage technology. Using global edge storage devices for tiered data storage, it only stores the most critical data, such as role information and smart contracts on the main chain in the storage system to ensure data integrity. In contrast, other data will be stored in tiers on non-essential edge storage devices so that the entire chain will not be synchronized.
This approach can substantially reduce the cost of redundancy, and the tiered storage technology will further decouple the chain from the storage layer. Since non-essential data will be stored on edge devices, it can ease the burden of on-chain storage and enhance the computing performance and access speed.
In addition, the proprietary erasure coding plus multi-copy RAFI risk-sensing technology in MEFS can further enhance data security through its recovery and fault tolerance mechanisms. This will also provide our Users with a collection of flexible options to choose from more suitable redundancy methods and storage cycles by their data needs. Supplemented by various data security recovery technologies, the two-pronged approach can ensure data storage security.
Internet + blockchain = Web3.0
Necessity of tiered storage in Web3.0
The era of information has shifted the way we store our data, advancing computing and storage decoupling closer to reality. Blockchain-empowered storage will inevitably accelerate the arrival of the Web3.0 era.
In the Internet era, the traditional centralized storage has been transformed into a more inclusive and flexible decentralized cloud storage enabled by blockchain technology. In summary, the key to computing and storage decoupling lies in the “storage”. To transform storage methods, decouple blockchain and storage layers based on the decentralized storage, reduce the extraction frequency of “invalid data”, and enhance the access speed of necessary data. With the transmission efficiency of the 5G network, decentralized cloud storage will become the most critical infrastructure in the Web3.0 era.
Application scenarios
In terms of application scenarios, traditional cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence, decentralized finance, NFT, and metaverse are all inseparable from explosive data storage.
Imagine a world of the metaverse and quasi-virtual world like Ready Player One. Every living second is a manifestation of data. The enormity of data cannot be simply measured in numeric terms. The massive data will go beyond the capabilities of traditional computing and storage technologies. Therefore, the advent of metaverse means revolutionizing data storage technology. MEFS charts the course on this innovation frontier.
MEFS has undertaken numerous innovations in its system design: data tiering and redundancy mechanisms can effectively control the system redundancy; data public verification mechanisms enable second-level verification; and the original RAFI technology can improve data recovery capabilities by several times.
The synergy of many innovative technologies has significantly enhanced the availability of the decentralized cloud storage system while ensuring data security. The tiered data storage mechanism powered by the blockchain and the storage layer decoupling enables second-level upload and download of metaverse data.
Storage is at the heart of everything. Computing and storage decoupling, decentralized storage data processing, and the underlying Metaverse and Web3.0 infrastructure, storage is indispensable wherever we are. The tiered storage mechanism decouples the blockchain from the storage layer is particularly important. Computing and storage constitute the undertone of this era. The Internet + blockchain is the future of Web3.0.
