The need for data center, memory-based caching solutions is rising. Today's application infrastructure simply requires too much information too quickly for conventional disk-only systems to keep up. There must be a way to deliver low-latency, rapid file access without a wholesale forklift upgrade of existing storage systems.
While caching is a near-universally accepted solution, there are often questions of how and where that caching investment should reside. In this short video (3m 42s) we outline Caching as a Network Service...and why we see network deployments as the most efficient and effective means to enhance existing and new data center solutions.
I was reading this paper a few hours ago and one of the conclusions struck me as relevant for network caching.
See the paper here:
Measurement and Analysis of Large-Scale Network File System Workloads, Andrew W. Leung et. al.
http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix/tech/leung.html
In Section 4.6, see Observation 8 in there.
"A small fraction of clients account for a large fraction of file activity."
I thought this could be one area where network caching devices could be beneficial in removing or atleast moving the bottleneck away from a NFS server without incurring the cost of upgrading it.
Posted by: Shehjar Tikoo | June 25, 2008 at 10:51 PM