December 3, 2013
The videos from RICON West 2013 are now available. RICON West brought together hundreds of developers to discuss distributed systems. It also featured 26 speakers over two days who spoke about new features in Riak, Riak in production, distributed systems in production, and research related to distributed systems.
In particular, there were some interesting talks related to how major companies are using Riak. James Hughes, Principal Technologist at Seagate Technology spoke on “The Seagate Kinetic Open Storage Platform: Innovation to Enable Scale Out Storage.” The week prior to RICON West, Seagate announced their Kinetic Open Storage Platform that utilized Riak as the backend. On Day One of RICON West, James Hughes did the first public demo of this platform during his session. The platform leverages Seagate’s expertise in hardware and software storage systems, integrating an open source API and Ethernet connectivity with Seagate hard drive technology.
RICON West also featured two speakers from The Weather Company, Raja Selvaraj (Manager of Data Systems Engineering) and Arvinda Gillella (SUN Architect). Their talk, “Building Next Generation Weather Data Distribution and On-demand Forecast Systems Using Riak,” describes The Weather Company’s need to effectively store and distributed terabytes of data, while still maintaining manageability, scalability and usability. Their talk focuses on the challenges they face trying to solve this problem and why they ultimately chose Riak as its solution. It also discusses their new IT platform, which uses Riak to build the next generation on-demand forecasting system.
