Applications

The Abstracts

Recent Advances in WAN Acceleration

Fast and convenient access to data hosted in central data centers has been a continuous challenge for application users in remote branch offices.  WAN-related performance problems associated with bandwidth and latency often pressure IT managers to deploy file and application servers in the branch offices themselves, in order to maintain application performance and end-user productivity.  But maintaining and backing-up remote server and storage assets outside of the data center is not only expensive, it also creates significant security risks.    This session explores new approaches involving disk-based deduplication, TCP protocol optimization, and application-level protocol chattiness mitigation to address this long-standing productivity vs. cost-efficiency issue.  We will compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of these new approaches with more traditional methods of addressing this problem.  Learning Objectives: 

Learning Objectives:

1. Understand why many applications perform poorly over the WAN in an environment with high latency and/or limitied bandwidth
2. Examine the pros and cons of compression, caching, and adding WAN bandwidth, and understand why these measures usually fail to address the entire underlying cause of the performance issue,
3. Explore how TCP protocol optimization, application-level protocol chattiness mitigation, and disk-based deduplication approaches can dramatically improve performance over the WAN and enable consolidation of server and storage resources into the data center

High Availability Using Fault Tolerance in the SAN

Availability is typically expressed as a percentage of uptime in a given year. Modern SANs have developed numerous methods using hardware and software fault tolerance to assure high availability of storage to customers. From the storage controller through the paths to the end servers, numerous methods exist to ensure continued access to storage in the event of faults and hardware/software failures. This tutorial will help the end user understand: 

Learning Objectives:

1. The concept of uptime vs availability 
2. What high availability really means 
3. Availability methods on the controller, paths and servers 
4. Availability methods on the software side, such as clustering
5. Common single points of failure  At the end of this tutorial, users should have a better understanding of what high availability means to their SAN, and how they can help ensure continued access to their storage.