Speaker
Description
With the seemingly exponential growth in the volume of data in recent years, the challenges for data engineering teams in operationalizing their big data workloads (e.g. AI/ML) while ensuring access and integrity have grown increasingly more complex. More often than not, these challenges have to be surmounted with limited budgets, which can be swiftly consumed depending on the cloud storage provider used. To effectively solve these challenges requires a radical departure from the status quo, putting data providers back in control of their data. Fortunately, recent developments in blockchain technology have conceived novel solutions to these in the form of decentralized storage networks. Seal Storage has been, and continues to be, at the forefront in the nascent ecosystem of such networks. Their decentralized storage platform is a secure, sustainable and high-performance solution for easily storing, synchronizing, and searching large datasets at scale, at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional cloud storage. By leveraging decentralized storage protocols such as FileCoin and IPFS, it bolsters the concept of No Single Point of Failure (SPOF), increasing data resiliency at zero cost for data providers. By providing APIs and associated toolchains using common protocols such as Simple Storage Service (S3), onboarding data can be achieved with minimal effort on behalf of data providers. All content on Seal’s storage platform is indexed with a unique fingerprint (cryptographic hash) called a Content Identifier (CID), which can be used at any time to verify the integrity of data on the blockchain. In this presentation we will highlight Seal’s storage platform, principles in depth, and how the ATLAS project at CERN has leveraged their platform for the long-term 10PiB R&D project. Finally, we will briefly cover our roadmap for future plans.
