Shoebox sized Datacenter - The Italian Job

Today Dennis and I presented our session “Datacenter performance in a Shoebox” aka “The Shoebox sized datacenter” at the Italian VMUG User Conference.The conference was a little bit smaller than the Dutch conference but it was a very nice crowd. We were welcomed with an amazing dinner on Tuesday. Thanks VMUGIT!

The session was about how much faster flash storage is compared to old fashioned spinning disks. Part of the presentation is a demo with a datacenter we actually took with us in a backpack! This shows how much storage performance you can get in the footprint about the size of a shoebox.

We presented this same session in March at the Dutch VMUG Conference.You can read about the Shoebox Sized DC in these blog posts: The Hardware, The Software and the mind blowing performance.

For the Italian edition we decided we needed to upgrade our “datacenter” to version 2.0. This new version has a brand new home brew NAS device as a replacement of the old Thecus NAS box we were using. It looks cooler, it’s lighter, it’s faster and a lot more stable. But getting the thing to work wasn’t as straight forward as I had hoped. You can read more about my journey of building this NAS device here.

Below are the records from both the Dutch event and the VMUG Italy conference You can find the presentation slides here.

In English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBTnt8bQrgc In Dutch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ2B_cDe6Rk