About technologies

There are still many myths about cloud services. The most persistent ones are associated with the enterprise information security and risk of unauthorized access by insiders and competitors. There is no smoke without fire: reputation of the entire cloud market was tainted by hosting providers and free file-sharing networks that do not adequately protect their cloud environments. Just recall the stories of massive data leaks from hacked iCloud and Dropbox.

The term 'Internet of Things' describes a 10-year old idea of remote control over any machine whatever it makes, coffee or industrial products.

In this post, I’ll tell you how we deployed ScaleIO, walking blindfolded across a minefield. I’ll also tell you about the storage architectural specifics, its integration with our cloud, and, of course, load testing.

A rather short and funny story faced by our customer in real life. One day an IT infrastructure provider decided to move its data center, with a 3-day downtime to follow. All customers were notified six months in advance but due to all the provider’s fuss and red tape some of them couldn’t get prepared on time.

A year ago, our good fellow, colleague and an enterprise storage guru appeared and said: “Hi, guys, I’ve got a cool 90 TB storage with all that fancy features, you know.” I can’t say we needed it too much, but it would have been rather stupid to refuse. So we configured a couple of backups and forgot about it.

In October 2009, we checked everything once again. We were to build an 800-rack data center. Our decision was backed up by our intuition, local market forecasts, and U.S. market analytics. It sounded logical enough but still we were a bit nervous as cloud computing or cloud hosting was a new thing for the Russian market that time...