Simplify Remote Offices

At Tech Field Day last year, Mark May heard from Riverbed about their SteelFusion appliance. This combines a remote appliance with an appliance in a datacenter to accelerate access to centralized data. For Mark, this simplifies a lot of remote office IT, by providing local performance at the remote site but while keeping all the advantages of centralizing management and data.

Google Cloud nested virtualization popularizes the technology

Mark May takes a look at how the announcement of nested virtualization support for Google Cloud will popularize the technology. He got a perfect example of this at Tech Field Day last month, where Scale Computing announced a partnership with Google Cloud to bring frictionless VM recovery to the service.

Cloudified Snapshots done two ways

Mark May shares his thoughts on what he saw from Dell EMC at Storage Field Day in June. He particularly focuses on their Unity storage array and how it integrates with their Cloud Tier appliance. This allows for moving data from the storage array into the public cloud. Mark really likes the ability to take snapshots of Unity, but writing the data to S3 storage.

He compares this to Pure Storage’s approach, which he saw at a Storage Field Day Exclusive event at Pure Accelerate. Pure allows you to write snapshots to AWS in its native format, as opposed to converting it to an object store. Both are interesting approaches to extending storage arrays into the cloud.

What the heck is tail latency?

Mark May elaborates on the problem of tail latency, as presented on by SNIA at Storage Field Day. According to SNIA, these spikes in latency can be up to ten times as bad as average latency. Mark says that this problem could be fixed by building smarter software that can tag an IO with a retry policy hint, allowing it to favor response time over data recovery. According to SNIA, over 2% of IO may be suffering due to tail latency. Mark knows this is a real problem and hopes it can be fixed in the near future.

Infrastructure performance means business results

Infrastructure performance means business results

Moving beyond the data center with data protection

Moving beyond the data center with data protection