Applications Infrastructure

Jump straight to an abstract:

• Consumer Storage and the Home Network Area:  A Tidal Wave of Opportunity
• Running Database Applicasions on NAS:  How and Why?
• Cloud Storage:  The New Paradigm for Accessing Storage as a Service
• Fundamental Approaches to WAN Optimization

The Abstracts

Consumer Storage and the Home Network Area:  A Tidal Wave of Opportunity
Rick Bauer
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The trends for networked storage in consumer environments continue to indicate that more and more data is finding its way into the home. While most home/consumer storage implementations were stand-alone/direct-attached, 2009 is seeing more and more networked storage begin appeared in residential environments. What are the implications as consumers want more "networking" in their home storage?

Learning Objectives

• To survey the growing market for home/consumer storage, and understand the drivers for continue growth in this market
  
• To understand what technologies are being implemented in this area, and look at future developments and technologies will exist in the "HAN" (Home Area Network), including commerce, e-government, entertainment, security, and energy management
  
• To expand the perception that SNIA is only a "big iron" trade association, and to stimulate the entrance of consumer storage companies into the SNIA and SNW.

Running Database Applicasions on NAS:  How and Why?
Stephen Daniel
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The use of NFS as a storage interconnect protocol for serious enterprise-class databases began around 1995.  The number of businesses running production databases over NAS protocols has grown steadily since then.  This talk will discuss the benefits and risks of using NFS as a database storage protocol, provide some historical examples of the subtle bugs that NFS clients have had that caused problems for databases, and show some performance measurements comparing NFS-based database performance to database performance using more traditional interconnects such as Fibre-Channel and iSCSI.  The talk will conclude with some future directions for this technology.

Learning Objectives

• Understand the functional issues that must be addressed for reliable operation and recovery of databases using NAS as a storage interconnect
• Understand the performance implications for a database implementation that uses NAS as a storage interconnect

Cloud Storage:  The New Paradigm for Accessing Storage as a Service
Ashvin Kamaraju
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We are witnessing a tectonic shift in how computational cycles, storage and applications are being consumed: as services delivered over the web, similar to the manner in which utilities such as power are delivered.  “Cloud” is a metaphor for the internet.  Using a Cloud based storage service frees consumers from worrying about protecting their precious and ever increasing digital data. And enterprises that subscribe to cloud based storage services with Service Level Agreements that meet the business requirements can free up significant portion of their data center related capital and operating expense budgets and instead invest in their core businesses.   This tutorial will focus only on storage as a service, key attributes or requirements of storage infrastructure for offering as a service and file oriented protocols for accessing the storage.

Learning Objectives

• Develop an understanding of storage infrastructure requirements for Cloud Storage
• Develop an understanding of how the capabilities of the storage infrastructure can be described by Web Services Description Language
• Develop an understanding of Web-based file access protocols.

Fundamental Approaches to WAN Optimization
Josh Tseng
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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, but 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 dilemma.  We will compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of these new approaches with more traditional methods of addressing this problem.

Learning Objectives

• Understand why many applications perform poorly in an environment with high latency and/or limited bandwidth
• Examine the pros and cons of compression, caching, and adding WAN bandwidth, and understand why these measures usually fail to address the underlying performance issue
• Explore how TCP transport optimization, application-level chattiness mitigation, and disk-based deduplication dramatically improve WAN performance
  

Key Programs