Joe Freeman: Tech, Teams, Trade-offs

Create Storage Spaces in Windows 10 Windows Server O/S contains Storage Spaces support for Server Spaces tiered storage. You can front slower spinning disks with smaller faster SSDs. Windows 10 has a Storage Spaces GUI Control Panel that does not include the tiered storage GUI. This means Powershell must be used for all configuration. https://github.com/freemansoft/win10-storage-spaces  contains scripts that create tiered storage pools that integrate SSDs as caching drives and HDDs as storage drives. They assume you have at least one SSD and one HDD. The scripts automatically find all raw drives and add them to the pool. Some HDDs have their types incorrectly identified. The script can coerce them to be MediaType:HDD The entire virtual drive is added to the system as a single large volume You need at least 1 SSD and 1 HDD to run cached storage / Simple resiliency 2 SSD and 2 HDD to run cached storage / Mirror resiliency / 1 SSD and 2 HDD to run cached storage / Simpl...

Standard App Topology This diagram shows a basic web app with two app servers.  It is a fairly straightforward architecture where the two app servers are used for load balancing and fault tolerance in case one server goes down.  A single data server or cluster is sufficient. Most  folks would probably actually have a web server tier between the clients and the App Instance tier but I'll skip it so some of the MS folks feel at home.   This diagram shows what happens when you start to increase the number of clients.  One of the beauties of the commodity server architecture is that you can continue to add application server instances to handle the additional load. Data servers can be clustered but there is a finite limit to the data tier size and performance.  You end up with an inverted pyramid where you application is teetering on top of a narrow data tier. NoSQL databases accelerate applications in two ways.  They increase the pe...