In my last cloud article, “Zynga and the cost of agility”, I referenced an article about Zynga’s return to AWS While at at AWS re:Invent 2015, I had a chance to hear first hand from Zynga’s CIO, Dorion Carroll, why Zynga left AWS in the early days and why they’re back. It was an excellent presentation and the story is a real lesson as to why a CIO should think real hard before they start buying infrastructure (even if you are going to deploy in a co-location facility).
I’ve been running a network attached storage (NAS) device for many years. I’ve really enjoyed the Netgear ReadyNAS product as an easy to use reliable appliance. I started out with a ReadyNAS NV+ and upgraded about 5 years later to a ReadyNAS Ultra. I’m still happy with the unit but I need to add more storage and I want to use my NAS box to also serve movies and other media. To do that I need a lot more storage and I need more processing power. The Plex media server that I’m going to use transcodes the movies to the target viewing platform on the fly so it’s fairly CPU intensive, a lot more than the ReadyNAS is designed for. It’s time to build a custom NAS and media server.
