On May 16, 2014, Oracle entered into an agreement to acquire GreenBytes, a provider of ZFS technology, for an undisclosed price. In addition to expertise in areas related to ZFS, GreenBytes has developed a deduplication, replication, and virtualization overlay for it. (Rather bizarrely, in a tussle with the then-giant in 2009, GreenBytes accused Sun of …
Continue reading “News: Oracle Buys GreenBytes — Once More on the Road to Obscurity”
There is a new set of tools available for Caching up and down the stack which we covered within Caching through out the Stack, however in reality where is the best place to cache data for your application and what are the ramifications of using such a cache. Recently, we had a caching problem, actually two of them. Both caused by the same thing, a lack of full understanding about what was being cached. For any application, the best way to cache is to cache in memory as close to the application stack as possible, which in our stack could be within the application, the OS, or even a hypervisor based disk cache. However, which does your application actually use?
One sure way to improve performance is to cache the non-dynamic data of any application. We did this to improve the overall performance of The Virtualization Practice website. However, there are many places within the stack to improve overall performance by caching, and this got me to thinking of all the different types. At the last Austin VMUG, there were at least three vendors selling caching solutions that were designed to improve overall performance by as little as 2x to upwards of 50x improvements. That is quite a lot of improvement in application performance. Where do all these caching products fit into the stack?
Implementing virtual desktops has often required a different thinking about storage and is heavily focused on lowering number of IOPS to provide the best desktop experience. Greenbytes appliances target to reduce costs and improve user performance.
