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Lets be honest, storage has always been a complicated subject. Teams of dedicated storage administrators would choose between block (SAN), file (NAS) or direct-attached (DAS), and then each choice led to more details such as HDD versus SSD. The cloud is supposed to make everything simple with storage-as-a-service. While the details of infrastructure have now been passed on to the magic of the cloud, there are still many choices that have a notable impact on performance, costs and scale.

Unlike buying an on-premises storage array where customers typically had to make compromises around the best storage for a workload and then live with that decision for up to five years, the rate of innovation and offerings in the cloud are nonstop.

On-premises storage decision-making was a big container that had to support many different workloads, often with serious tradeoffs. The cloud now lets you pick the best storage for every workload and even subsets of those workloads. Need ultra-low latency storage for your database? Done! Need low-cost storage for long-term retention of rarely-accessed data? The cloud has the storage for you!

Taking full advantage of cloud storage requires IT managers to stop thinking in terms of storage volumes and pivot to thinking about the data. By segmenting datasets, you can pick the right resources and, more importantly, pivot data to a better cloud resource as your cloud vendor introduces new services or if you realize your initial choice is under- or over-utilized. Lets look at the options:

Object storage is built for the cloud. It boasts unlimited scale with global namespace, which is akin to a universal file directory that makes it seem as if all unstructured data distributed across devices and locations is in a single location.Accessible over the HTTP protocol rather than file protocols like NFS and SMB, object is perfect for web-scale access of unstructured data. Object storage is presented to applications through a URL and storage tasks such as read, write and delete are accessed through simple commands that make it easy to consume by applications.

Also known as Network Attached Storage or NAS, file storage is presented via the popular NFS and SMB protocols for unstructured data. File is often the choice for existing applications versus new born in the cloud apps. File will typically boast higher performance and lower latency versus object with the tradeoff of limited capacity both in terms of number of files and size of volumes.File access is optimized for local or corporate network versus the global namespace that object offers.

Object and file are abstractions on top of storage resources that can increase scale and simplicity, whereas block storage is the equivalent of a local hard disk or direct attached storage. When implemented over a network, block storage is referred to as a storage area network (SAN). Block storage provides the lowest latency and highest performance because it is dedicated to a single application or server without an abstraction layer.

Storage is a space for rapid innovation and the choices are getting more nuanced all the time:

The true innovation of the cloud is that all these options are just a few clicks away and you can change storage as your requirements change. The key is to understand those requirements by analyzing your data both before and after you move to the cloud. Make the best decision for your workloads and data based on current usage and then monitor over time with an eye for new offerings. By optimizing your data for performance, durability and costs over the available resources you can innovate faster and save money.

StevePruchniewski is Director of Product Marketing atKomprise.

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How to pick the right cloud storage - VentureBeat

The tech world's pandemic supply chain meltdown drove ServiceNow to place orders for a year worth of datacenter kit in January 2022, believing that doing so was necessary to get the hardware it needed to cope with growing customer workloads.

"Pre-COVID, I could generally get stuff in 45 days," CTO Pat Casey told The Register at ServiceNow's Knowledge 22 conference in Sydney, Australia, today.

Well-publicized coronavirus-related supply challenges caused ServiceNow's lead time for some networking kit to stretch to 160 days, while servers can take 120 days to arrive.

So the company "literally placed our entire 2022 order in January," he explained.

"We did it to get in line with the supply chain. If we order it now, hardware starts landing in Q3. If I order in Q3 2022 to meet hardware demand for Q4 2022, I will get the product in Q3 2023."

ServiceNow can't afford to wait that long because, the biz hosts clients on its own infrastructure Casey finds it cheaper to do so. Startups and small companies, he said, rightly balk at paying for datacenter engineers to run their own operations. ServiceNow has reached a scale at which it can afford an infrastructure staff to manage the 200,000 or so instances it runs.

Casey also feels that Amazon Web Services offers "a generic cloud." ServiceNow prefers hardware tuned to the needs of its application, which requires servers loaded up with memory and disk.

"We run one app. I can buy gear optimized for that, which means I can stack it denser; I can often get exactly the stuff I need. The price points are there," Casey elaborated.

The CTO said ServiceNow has found that "middling CPUs" meet its needs. "There is a spectrum of chips: the fast chips with a small number of cores, and the slower you get the more cores they give you for the same amount of power. We are somewhere in the middle we can't run all that efficiently on the core-happy but fairly slow stuff, but it is not worth us to pay a pile of money for something with only four cores on it to get 12 percent faster."

ServiceNow is an x86 shop, though Casey said the company has considered alternatives including IBM's Power architecture. It has not been convinced to change.

ServiceNow's servers use locally attached NVMe storage, housed on separate cards. Shared storage is used sparingly, and usually in the same rack as the servers it, well, serves.

Casey said ServiceNow was one of the first customers of Fusion-io, the storage upstart that was early to market with flash storage on PCIe cards. "It was life changing for us because it was so much better than the spinning disk arrays we had," Casey enthused. "At one point we were buying ten percent of Fusion-io's annual production. We were their number one customer. We are still a big buyer of NVMe storage."

Yet Casey still sees some hangovers from the days of mechanical hard disks in the world of software.

"A lot of the internals of a database are really designed to work around the behaviors of spinning disk arrays," he told The Register. "On NVMe it is almost not worth it. The double write buffering behaviors you see in a lot of databases, you don't need that on NVMe. They are actually counterproductive."

Casey said ServiceNow is a big user of, and investor in, MariaDB, with around 200,000 instances running. In August 2021, ServiceNow acquired German database vendor Swarm64 in the expectation its Postgres-based tech will enable rapid analytics and potentially be useful for primary storage, too. MonetDB, an open source effort led by folks in the Netherlands, also has a home at ServiceNow. Casey said it is "very, very fast, but also sort of fragile."

"You set it up, you load your column storage fast as a thief, but if you change it, it degrades," he said. "So we have to run two of them in parallel, then swap them."

Casey doesnt see any technology on the horizon that he thinks will have a positive impact to compare with that of NVMe, though he is keeping an eye on Compute Express Link (CXL) without being close to a decision. He's aware of SmartNICs but has no plan to adopt them.

One project that has commenced is the development of a backup tier. ServiceNow wrote its own backup solution and is thinking of using a standardized protocol namely, Amazon Web Services' S3 for that tech.

That's not an indication ServiceNow will adopt AWS storage. Instead, Casey said the company may deploy software that speaks the S3 protocol. ServiceNow would not be alone in doing so AWS's cloud storage offering is so pervasive that many on-prem storage rigs and applications use its protocol to allow easier access to hybrid cloud storage. For ServiceNow, S3-compatible storage in-house therefore has value.

Casey's job isn't all infrastructure he also guides development of ServiceNow's products. In that role, he said, an ongoing challenge is the user interface both to ensure complexity does not become an issue and because end-user demands remain high. People expect the ease of consumer tech experiences replicated at work.

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ServiceNow ordered a year's worth of hardware to avoid supply chain hassles - The Register

When it comes to playing the music, his sprawling setup involves multiple computers, tablets, monitors, speakers, and headphones. His collection stretches back to 2006, though hes got boxes filled with even older data CDs and hard drives, his adolescence encased in digital amber, ready to be unearthed.

Not all collectors are so chaotic. Marty Sartini Garner, a copywriter at the Los Angeles Philharmonic and music critic who has written for Pitchfork, occupies a place somewhere near the other end of the spectrum. He limits his CD rips to one per day, and moves them to an aging iPod Classic that he listens to with his Airpods and a Bluetooth adapter. This more minimal setup allows him to put down his phone, close the laptop, and narrow his focus to whatever hes listening to. Hell download records from Bandcamp, but likes the IRL experience of walking to Fingerprints, his local record shop in Long Beach, California, known for its impressive stock of new and used CDs. He still keeps a vinyl collection and an analog stereo, but his latest move necessitated a pruning of his physical collection.

My personal setup splits the difference between Nappys maximalist strategy and Garners more Zen-like approach. I still use the same iTunes library I started in 2003, when I bought my first iPod. And I subscribe to Apple Music, which includes a service called iTunes Match, that either matches songs in my library or uploads my own copy to their servers, letting me stream or download any song in my collection from any Apple device associated with my Apple ID. I currently have about 47,000 songs over 700GB, and the library is stored on a pair of hard drives inside my desktop computer that are backed up twice internallyonce to a single drive every night, and again to a Time Machine backup that saves hourly incremental backups. Every few months I swap a third backup in and out of a fireproof safe at my parents house just in case my building burns down. This process may sound like a lot, but in reality, its mostly self-sustaining: Once I add a record to the collection, its almost immediately available to play in any room of my home, or on any device I ownanywhere with an internet connection.

Every collectors setup is different, and what works for you should be based on what gear you already have, your budget for what you dont, and the effort youre willing to put in. Storage space has never been cheaper: Even the most durable 4TB hard drives can be had for less than $100 nowadays. Most of the equipment youll needcomputer, smartphone, stereo, headphones, routeryou likely already own. You might even have a dusty CD collection waiting to be ripped, old drives that can be repurposed, or a cloud storage account that can be set up for automatic backups.

You dont need thousands of dollars, a huge home, or an advanced degree to maintain a digital collection. Some collectorsincluding mecan be intense, but it doesnt have to be that serious to be rewarding. Everyone started with one file, one song, one album. All it takes is time, effort, and a little bit of love.

This week, were exploring how music and technology intersect, and what todays trends and innovations might mean for the future. Read more here.

Read more from the original source:
The Obsessive World of Digital Music Collectors - Pitchfork

The founding member of a coalition of tech firms that accused Microsoft of anti-competitive behaviour, based on how it sells and packages its cloud services in Europe, has claimed the software giant must do more to address the antitrust complaints being levied against it.

Microsoft published a blog post this week acknowledging the antitrust concerns that have been raised with regulators and authorities about its cloud-related business practices in Europe, which it also used to outline a series of meaningful actions it would take to address the issues raised.

As detailed in a report on Reuters last month, these concerns are known to have prompted the European Commissions antitrust authorities to send a questionnaire to Microsoft customers and competitors, asking for their views on Microsofts cloud-related licensing deals.

The commission has information that Microsoft may be using its potentially dominant position in certain software markets to foreclose competition regarding certain cloud computing services, the questionnaire said, reported Reuters.

This information is based on complaints filed with the European Commission by several European cloud service providers, including German file sync and share software maker NextCloud and French infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider OVHcloud.

Nextclouds antitrust complaint, filed in early 2021, takes umbrage at the way Microsoft bundles its OneDrive cloud storage service and online collaboration platform Teams in with its flagship Windows operating system. It claims this practice is aggressively pushing consumers to sign up and hand over their data to Microsoft.

Nextclouds complaint has since won the support of more than 50 tech firms and non-profit organisations, leading to the formation of a coalition that is collectively speaking out against how Microsoft sells and packages its cloud software in Europe. The company has also filed a complaint against Microsoft of a similar nature with Germanys own antitrust authorities.

In ablog post dated 18 May 2022, Microsoft president and vice-chair Brad Smith said the company was taking meaningful action on the complaints being raised against it, including the adoption of five pledges that it claims will shape its approach to doing business in Europe in years to come.

These pledges include commitments to ensuring its public cloud meets Europes needs and serves Europes values, that its platforms are set up to ensure the success of European software developers and that it will provide support for European cloud providers through partnership.

The remaining two pledges made by Microsoft include a commitment to ensure our cloud offerings meet European governments sovereign needs, in partnership with local trusted technology providers and a vow to recognise that European governments are regulating technology, and we will adapt to and support these efforts.

According to Microsoft, these pledges mark the start of the work it is doing to address regulatory concerns, and are intended to guide all aspects of our cloud business, enhance transparency for the public, and help us to better support Europes technology needs.

In addition, the company said it was also taking steps to ensure European cloud providers could more easily host a wider variety of Microsoft products on their cloud infrastructure.

It added: This will make European cloud providers more competitive by enabling them to better serve customers.

While these actions are broad they are also not necessarily exhaustive, continued Smith. As I said in a video meeting a few weeks ago with the CEO of a European cloud provider, our immediate goal is to turn a long list of issues into a shorter list of issues.

In other words, lets move rapidly so we can learn quickly. Today were taking a big step, but not necessarily the last step we will need to take, and we look forward to continuing feedback from European cloud providers, customers and regulators, he added.

Speaking to Computer Weekly, Nextcloud CEO Frank Karlitschek said the actions Microsoft was committing to take were indicative of the pressure it is feeling in the wake of the complaints, but there is still more the company should be looking to do.

The main issue here is that we have a super-dominant position from Microsoft [It is] really dominating this whole market and this is not healthy, he said. Thats not healthy for the open market, thats not healthy for privacy and its not healthy for digital sovereignty for Europe. We want the regulators to do something against it to make sure theres fair competition and a level playing field.

In terms of the follow-up action Nextcloud and the coalition would like to see Microsoft take, Karlitschek said a commitment from the company to make parts of its cloud stack open source would be a start.

Across Europe, you have this movement towards digital sovereignty, where governments want to be in control of their data and applications. So, if you are a government or a company and you use Microsoft or Google or Amazons service even if its hosted in Europe thats still under US jurisdiction because of the CLOUD Act, he said.

This is what theyre trying to solve here by giving other cloud providers the option to hold this Microsoft stick, but obviously this is not enough, because you still have a dependency to Microsoft because Microsoft is not open source.

He continued: Digital sovereignty would only come with open source software. What it has proposed so far is interesting and is a move in the right direction, in response to the pressure it is under, but this is not enough.

Data from IT market watcher Synergy Research Group in September 2021 shed some light on the impact the US tech giants growing hold on the European market was having on the fortunes of local cloud providers.

While the market itself has grown nearly fourfold since 2017 to a value of $8.8bn, European cloud providers have seen their share of the market fall from 27% to 16% during that same time period, although the revenue these firms make has doubled during that time.

Computer Weekly also contacted OVHcloud for its take on Microsofts plans, given it has also raised an antitrust complaint against the company with regulators in the past, and received the following statement in response.

Microsoft acknowledges the merits of our complaint and we can only regret that it has to go as far as mobilising the relevant authorities to secure a level playing field in Europe, where competition is both open and fair, said the statement.

We are now waiting to see the concrete implementation conditions of these resolutions and remain committed to defending a level playing field for the European cloud ecosystem.

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Microsoft urged to do more to address European cloud antitrust complaints - ComputerWeekly.com