This article was originally written by IPFS Force Zone According to Cailian News on October 19, Vice Premier Liu He delivered a written speech at the "2020 World VR Industry Conference Cloud Summit" and pointed out: accelerate the improvement of new infrastructure and coordinate the construction of three types of new infrastructure. Two of the new infrastructures are related to distributed storage, including new technology infrastructure represented by artificial intelligence, cloud computing, blockchain, etc.; and computing power infrastructure represented by data centers and intelligent computing centers. Filecoin has long been committed to creating: using idle resources to store effective data, and then shaping it into a data exchange platform that can expand more applications. So, how many distributed storage projects are there on the market and what are their business models? 1. In the rapidly advancing distributed storage sector, what is the future of Filecoin? From a horizontal perspective , there are mainly Filecoin, Curve, HDFS, Ceph and GlusterFS, etc. From a vertical perspective, there are Filecoin, Arweave, Crust, Burst, Bluzelle, Storj and Sia, etc. From a horizontal perspective, we can observe the development path of distributed storage projects on a timeline; from a vertical perspective, we can observe the exploration progress of distributed storage projects in the blockchain. Horizontal comparison: Learning from others’ experience can help you polish your jade The IPFS project integrates BitTorrent, DHT, Git and SFS technologies to create a Peer-to-Peer hypermedia protocol, attempting to build a faster, more secure and open next-generation Internet, and to realize a global file storage system that is permanently available on the Internet and can permanently preserve data. Filecoin is an incentive layer running on IPFS. It is a distributed storage network based on blockchain. It turns cloud storage into an algorithm market, and FIL plays the role of transaction medium in the entire market. The Filecoin protocol has data retrieval and data storage. Both parties submit their needs in the market to reach a transaction. Project comparison, IPFS Force Zone, 2020-10-19 Filecoin combines the technical advantages of many excellent projects and builds a Web 3.0 framework specifically for the IPFS network, which is more flexible and applicable to a variety of scenarios. The following are the differences between Filecoin and other projects: The difference in access interfaces satisfies the storage interaction of large files. In summary, Ceph, GlusterFS and other mainstream servers are all installed with Unix-like operating systems, and file storage supports POSIX IO semantics. Filecoin data storage draws on traditional POSIX semantics, because the file is too large to accommodate a single data block and therefore cannot meet the requirements of IPFS, so IPFS Unixfs needs to use a pluggable data sharding algorithm to shard files with traditional POSIX semantics. Files with traditional POSIX semantics are bytes stored sequentially, while IPFS Unixfs is a directed acyclic graph based on sharding. At present, cold storage is the main service, and more applications will be supported in the future, such as large, medium and small file storage with multiple clusters and multiple nodes. Filecoin is in its early stages of development, and there are not many mature and complete application programs. The more mature services are mainly cold storage. At present, there are some product plans for hot storage and large, medium and small file storage and other new directions in the Filecoin ecosystem. I believe that the future implementation scenarios will be more comprehensive. Born for search, with limited speed and high throughput access. Filecoin is currently similar to Ceph, a dedicated file system that can achieve massive data search, but the algorithms are different. The current problem is that Filecoin cannot currently meet the requirements of high data throughput, resulting in limited large-scale commercial implementation. Vertical comparison: The smoke of war is rising, and a hundred schools of thought are contending As of October 19, 2020, according to the statistics of Filecoin, Arweave, Crust, Burst, Storj and Sia, the total market value is 5.506 billion yuan. Among them, Filecoin accounts for 65.23%, ranking first, followed by Sia and Arweave, accounting for 14.50% and 12.19% respectively. Project comparison, IPFS Force Zone, 2020-10-19 Although Filecoin was launched slowly, it has gained momentum lately. In just a few days, its market value has exceeded 50% of the total market value of the storage sector. The main reasons are as follows: The financing amount of 257 million US dollars laid the foundation for a huge market value. For a company, initial financing largely determines the valuation scale of the listing. At the same time, years of technological accumulation can help further increase the market value. Filecoin ends with Web 3.0 and starts with practical applications. Many projects such as Arweave, Burst, and Bluzelle are concepts first, with tokens released for circulation. The actual implementation planning of the projects is relatively long, and it has been difficult to implement. From the construction of the Filecoin ecosystem, we can see that in the 1&2 phases of the space race, storage scale, storage demand, and application implementation have been encouraged, and efforts have been made to create truly implementable applications. Behind this demanding economic model, in addition to tightly binding miners together, it also binds future implementation applications together, such as Smartcity, Zangshell, and Starry Sky in Yunnan. The strict proof mechanism requires the creation of the best storage services. The Filecoin proof mechanism is too strict, and it is also a test of the miners' operation and maintenance capabilities. Because of this, many projects are waiting for an opportunity to fork or derive another storage project with a low threshold for participation. In fact, behind all this, it is mainly because the Protocol Labs has a high-quality storage service awareness and a long-term landing concept for the Filecoin network. Otherwise, like Sia, it will be landed early, but the market scale and demand will be difficult to expand further for a long time, trapped by the 2 PiB total network computing power. Next, how will Filecoin explore new practical applications from these projects in the future? 2. The business model of distributed storage 1) Ceph: Cloud computing infrastructure that is constantly upgraded The community triggers innovation, and productization is the ultimate destination Sage Weil, the father of Ceph, once said: "It is an inevitable trend for Ceph to move from community to commercialization. After all, the ultimate destination of all technologies is products." Ceph is moving towards productization with the help of the community and products. Through the community, we can expand our thinking and pursue innovation, and then through the stability of Ceph products, we can explore different fields and industries to make stable, replicable and applicable enterprise-level products. The community makes Ceph more and more prosperous, and the ecosystem is constantly expanding, including connecting to different ecological hardware and software. In the past few years, applications based on Ceph have covered many key industries including finance, government, games, operators, media, etc. The main application scenarios of Ceph include cloud platforms and virtualization of traditional enterprise IT architectures. Cloud computing infrastructure transformation In fact, at the very beginning, Ceph's original intention was to provide a PB-level storage solution for a supercomputer in a computer room, and it initially enabled the file system in the HPC field. With the advent of the cloud computing era, Ceph's goal has gradually evolved into providing infrastructure for cloud computing, expanding from one supercomputing center to many supercomputing centers, and its scale continues to expand. Ceph is a file storage that first existed, combined with the open source cloud management platform Openstack, focusing on blocks and objects; thus becoming a unified storage for files, blocks, and objects. Currently, the Ceph system can meet the needs of cloud computing. The development process of Ceph can be reviewed as follows: first, the storage solution was solved, then the file storage was upgraded and expanded, and then gradually upgraded to unified storage to meet the requirements of cloud computing. 2) HDFS: Hadoop seizes the open source market and develops data processing software In 2005, Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella added MapReduce computing on top of HDFS to create Google's distributed file system Hadoop, whose core technology is still based on HDFS. The prototype of the Internet tests the business model. With the rise of Web 2.0, a large number of users and website data have exploded. At this time, a large number of Internet companies have data and needs, but lack a cost-effective data analysis system. At this time, the open source and free Hadoop tool has seized the blue ocean market of big data and laid the foundation for the feasibility of the business model. The open source movement created business opportunities. In the early 21st century, the developer community launched an open source movement. At this time, Hadoop created an open source, free, Internet-style big data processing software response source code that can be connected to the world, and quickly reached this part of the market group in the field of Internet big data processing. Hadoop helps the ecosystem, and the ecosystem feeds back revenue. It is also because of the open source movement that Hadoop quickly established three companies (Cloudera, HotonWorks, and MapR) in a short period of time to develop the Hadoop open source ecosystem, which promoted the deployment and adoption rate of Hadoop users throughout the ecosystem. Ultimately, Hadoop relies on business to promote the construction of the open source ecosystem, so as to achieve the ecosystem feeding back to business - to achieve revenue. In the early days of Web 2.0, Hadoop seized the market gap through free data analysis system services and captured a large number of customers. Later, in the process of promoting the development of the open source ecosystem, it also began to convert corresponding services into revenue. So, what other distributed storage business models are there? And what can Filecoin learn from them? What is the market prospect? We will continue to share in the next article. Statement: This article is an original article from IPFS Force District. The copyright belongs to IPFS Force District. It may not be reproduced without authorization. Violators will be held accountable according to law. Tip: Investment is risky, so be cautious when entering the market. This article is not intended as investment and financial advice. |
