Host:
Welcome back to the Endpoint Management Podcast by Adaptiva. Today, we're going to hear from Chad Kunz about how Adaptiva's Zero Footprint Caching gives you quota-less storage for your content by using the surplus storage capacity of the endpoints already on your network. If you enjoy this, maybe check out our other episodes with Chad about how we optimize over both WAN and LAN networks. As always, links are in the show notes or you can find everything you need and get in touch with us at Adaptiva.com.

Chad Kunz:
Hi, this is Chad Kunz with Adaptiva, here today to discuss with you our Zero Footprint Caching and Virtual SAN management. In previous discussions, we've talked about how we are delivering the content to the office. Then once it gets to the office, how we're distributing that content to all the other clients in an office which need the content. But today's discussion is going to be around where we're storing the content, number one, and number two, how we're managing that content to ensure, once it's been delivered, it's going to be available in two weeks, two months, and in two years, if that content is still valid in SCCM. Of course our cache management is completely self-managing. Once you delete it from SCCM, we will automatically delete it from all of our clients, but so long as it's still valid, good content, we want to be sure you have no re-download events in case content is needed again after the initial deployment.

Chad Kunz:
So to start with the Zero Footprint Caching, similar to our discussion on how we harvest unused bandwidth on our WAN delivery. Here we are harvesting the unused disk space on our clients, giving you a quota-less cache. No need to restrict cache size to 10, or 15 gigs, whatever the case may be. We're going to unlock all of that free space. Now, of course, the first concern is we don't want users to go into their hard drives and see that they're unnecessarily full, and then to have your users wasting time needlessly cleaning up disk space to get below a threshold. And to address that concern, what we're actually doing is we store all of our content in our cache in unallocated clusters. We are not marking this space as being in-use to NTFS. Essentially, we are storing this content in free space. It does not reflect against the usage on any volumes.

Chad Kunz:
So by unlocking all of these gigs and gigs and terabytes, even, in even the smallest of locations with today's hard drive resources, this is what allows us to unlock virtually unlimited cache space for all of your systems management traffic, but further, to be sure that we're maintaining that content, what I think perhaps is the coolest part of this feature is how we're managing these caches. If you think about traditional revolving caches, they're managed on a device-by-device basis. And when they get a cache crunch, a cache deletion request, they arbitrarily remove the oldest piece of content. Well, that oldest piece content, especially in a fixed cache setup could be the last Office 365, three and a half gigs of content in that office. So when your neighbor comes back from vacation next week, and they request that content, they're looking at a WAN download event.

Chad Kunz:
So what we have engineered is what I like to refer to as content awareness. Every time a system receives or removes a piece of content, we notify all of our peers and we maintain this information in a small little file database within our client. Now that we know what content is available on each peer. We also know what content's most prevalent in that office, so that when we get a cache crunch, a content deletion request, rather than arbitrarily removing the oldest, possibly last piece of a content, we are going to remove the content that the most number of peers have, ensuring that content has high availability - that it's going to be available when, and if needed in the future. Additionally, another hidden feature, if you will here, for this, our cache management is we have Wake-on-LAN built into our product. If at the time we send out our request for content none of our peers respond because of this file database because of our services discovery protocol, we are going to know other machines that could still be available in that office, but just shut down, where we're going to be able to send locally sourced magic packs, no need to open up network traffic routing for this.

Chad Kunz:
We're going to locally send those magic packs, try and wake up a system on-site that already has that content rather than going to another WAN download event. This technology, the Zero Footprint Caching and the Virtual SAN was probably the most important reason to a very large retail customer of ours, for deciding to forgo the 1E Nomad solution in favor of OneSite, because they found in their environment, they were cycling through content so quickly. They were constantly looking at re-WAN download events, which was impacting their compliance time for being able to get machines patched, software rolled out within X number of days, because as the content would cycle in, it would cycle out just as fast, constant WAN downloads, and this technology has proven successful over the years where they have found when we get this content down to a store, down to an office, we are able to maintain it and all future deployments go extremely quickly.

Host:
Thanks for joining us for today's episode from Adaptiva, where we're working to take the pain out of endpoint management with a solution that scales automatically so that your management, maintenance, and infrastructure costs don't have to. For more information about how we do that, visit us at Adaptiva.com.