The storage industry welcomes the "iPhone moment" Is decentralization the best solution for the metaverse?

Original source: Metaverse

Author: Jia Guipeng

Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI

Since ancient times, human beings have always tried to store data, in primitive times people carved murals in caves and recorded events with ropes, and in modern society, people write words on paper, record life with lenses, and back up records in the cloud.

Over the long history of information storage, the way data is stored has evolved as technology has evolved. In the future, in the era of the metaverse, which is known as the “end of the Internet”, how will people store data?

Centralized storage is being phased out

The metaverse is moving from science fiction to reality, and the major breakthrough in the implementation of the metaverse concept lies in how people store and use massive amounts of data, so that 4K, 8K, XR and other content have higher popularity and penetrate into various fields.

At present, centralized storage and distributed storage are the storage architectures that enterprises have a large layout. Among them, traditional centralized storage started early, has mature technology, simple structure, and shows sufficient stability, and has good support for high IOPS, low latency, and strong data consistency. Especially in recent years, all-flash array storage has developed rapidly, and the IOPS performance has been improved to more than 100 times that of HDD storage, which can effectively solve the pain points of IOPS performance. However, for the storage of metaverse data, centralized storage also faces many problems.

First, centralized storage is where a single entity has complete control over the data, which poses a security risk because there is a single point of failure for a centralized server;

An example may illustrate the security risks of centralized storage, such as a company that gives an important document to A, and as a result, the file is stolen at A, which is the data loss that can be caused by centralized storage. And, when the company hands over a document to A, how does the company ensure that the document is vested or belongs only to the company? If everyone hands over important documents to A for safekeeping, does A have a “monopoly” in the company?

Second, centralized storage lacks interoperability, even though almost 94% of companies use this technology to store data. In gaming, for example, gamers can spend thousands of hours playing on Roblox, Minecraft, or Fortnite, but game data cannot be transferred to each other, regardless of the network.

There is no doubt that the metaverse will become the best testing ground for data storage technology and product innovation, and the direction that traditional storage did not dare to think about and do in the past will no longer exist, and will be replaced by a new paradigm of storage products.

Is distributed storage the optimal solution for the metaverse?

At present, in addition to centralized storage, many enterprises use distributed storage, and for the data generated by the construction of the metaverse, is distributed storage a better solution for the metaverse in terms of storage?

As we all know, data is a very important resource in the metaverse era, and at the same time, data will also become an asset, that is, in the virtual world, everyone can have virtual assets, and in order to ensure the security of data assets, it is necessary to involve the application of storage technology.

Distributed storage ensures data reliability in the metaverse in a number of ways:

1. Redundancy: The distributed storage system will add redundancy information to the data to ensure that the same data can be stored repeatedly on different nodes.

2. Verification: The distributed storage system will use data verification techniques, such as parity check, CRC32, etc., to check the integrity and consistency of the data.

3. Replication: Distributed storage systems can increase the availability and durability of data by replicating it to multiple nodes.

4. Sharding: A distributed storage system can divide large data files into smaller fragments and store each fragment on a different node.

5. Blockchain technology: The combination of distributed storage and blockchain technology can provide more secure and reliable data storage and verification. Blockchain technology uses cryptographic algorithms and a decentralized network to ensure that data cannot be tampered with and stored permanently.

An analyst told the Metaverse: “Distributed storage is to protect data from tampering, the original centralized storage data is concentrated on a single platform, distributed storage is to disperse data to the various service nodes we work with, and only the corresponding vendor, that is, the user, can get the key to extract the relevant data.” ”

For example, distributed storage is like a company that has recorded the ownership of a file on the chain when it sends it, and when the data is lost at place A, there are corresponding backups at “B”, “C”, and “D”, which can make the company’s data more secure.

Moreover, the distributed network storage system adopts a scalable system structure, using multiple storage servers to share the storage load, and using location servers to locate and store information, which not only improves the reliability, availability and access efficiency of the system, but also is easy to expand.

For example, distributed storage is like a forest, this forest area is extremely large, and the various applications of the metaverse are like the seeds of a tree, with the help of distributed storage technology, it can be “infinitely sown” in this forest, regardless of land area. This also means that the metaverse relies on distributed storage technology and does not rely on centralized servers, and human beings are pouring into the metaverse virtual space to create and build gameplay, which will not cause server paralysis and downtime, and have greater imagination.

At present, on a global scale, manufacturers such as Microsoft, Google, and Netflix, domestic cloud service providers such as Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Huawei, and Inspur, as well as many downstream application service providers, constitute the entire industrial chain. Although distributed storage is still in its infancy and exploration stage, many application projects have already been implemented and have a huge technology and industrial ecosystem.

On the whole, the data generated by the metaverse has very high requirements for the security, scalability and ease of use of storage, and the decentralization of distributed storage, system structure and storage capacity for fragmented data are very much in line with the needs of metaverse storage, therefore, we can also draw a conclusion that distributed storage is a better solution for metaverse storage.

Write at the end

The development of the metaverse and distributed storage technology will bring great changes to the Internet. The metaverse will continue to expand its applications in education, entertainment, healthcare, and other fields, and will also enter more industry sectors. Distributed storage technology will become the core technology of data storage and transmission in the Metaverse, providing more secure, reliable and efficient data support for the Metaverse.

In the future, it is foreseeable that the data scale and data growth rate brought by the metaverse will continue to accelerate, which will inevitably attract more data storage vendors to enter the market, continue to explore and innovate, and promote the sustainable development of distributed storage and the metaverse.