Dealing with the “Other” Latency: What the Cloud Portends for IT Infrastructure

As flash storage becomes mainstream, storage pros are frequently bombarded by vendors and the press about the importance of latency when considering the performance of storage systems.

Simultaneously, the public cloud has emerged as a remote computing resource that is disrupting the way businesses use IT. In a world of geographically dispersed islands of compute, however, the latency problem takes on a different complexion: System designers need to consider the impact of physical distance and the speed of light more carefully than the latency of storage media.

In this discussion, we will cover some of the implications of latency on the performance of distributed systems and, in particular storage systems, in the context of the public cloud. We’ll detail:

The performance limitations that latency can create
Tools and infrastructure that can be used to mitigate these effects
A reference architecture that can minimize this problem holistically
Learning Objectives

The performance limitations that latency can create
Tools and infrastructure that can be used to mitigate these effects
A reference architecture that can minimize this problem holistically