This article describes StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze as a solution to make local backup applications operate seamlessly with a cloud object storage. This all-in-one solution combines the ability of a backup storage pool to offload the backup data to Backblaze B2 cloud storage, and immediately retrieve it – all at a bargain price.

Regarding the growing demand on the cloud, it’s no problem finding a cloud storage provider. However, there are only few market players that can be considered true leaders of this industry. Amazon is one of these guys, with S3 cloud storage serving a perfect fit for any business regardless of its size. But still, even Amazon’s customers face several challenges during data migration process to S3, especially, when it comes to petabytes.

In this article, we will discuss the split brain issue, and different approaches to prevent it from happening. The situation when communication loss between the cluster nodes is caused by network connection problems is called network partition, which can lead to split brain. According to Wikipedia, split brain is a computer term, based on an analogy with the medical split-brain syndrome. It can be a real horror for a system administrator to handle the consequences of a split brain.

A few years ago, we have tried to place a VM on an NFS share. We used Windows Server 2012 because Hyper-V is a native hypervisor from Microsoft. Now we have decided to reproduce the experiment on Windows Server 2016. Just because of boundless curiosity 😊 So, we have 2 nodes: S3n11 serves as NFS Fileserver and S3n12 takes the Hyper-V server role. We will do exactly the same thing as we did before, but this time on Windows Server 2016 on both VMs. Let’s start!