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This Buying Guide looks at four ways to achieve faster storage in the cloud. It deals with several different issues within storage and the companies that are offering up a solution: SolidFire on flash in the cloud; Riverbed on backup centralization/WAN optimization; iWave on cloud automation; and Ciena on moving data rapidly to the cloud.
Ciena is all about the enterprise data center to cloud connection, moving peak workloads from one data center to the cloud and back. Interestingly, this company is a networking company, not a storage player. But the rise of Big Data and the need to move large quantities of information around leads straight into its core competence -- carrier grade network connectivity.
Here is the basic value proposition: If an IT administrator must make a platform change on a single server loaded with 10 VMs of medium size, with each VM having 5 GB of memory and 1,000 GB of storage, the total data to transfer would be about 10 terabytes (10x5 GB memory + 10x1000 GB storage). To transfer 10 TB of data over a typical 40 Mb/s MPLS connection takes approximately four weeks, assuming full bandwidth utilization, no re-transmissions and 80 percent utilization of the network.
"Ciena can accomplish the same data transfer in around five hours," said Jim Morin, Product Line Director at Ciena.
The company recently demonstrated a live vMotion of more than 100 km, and storage virtualization between EMC VPlex clusters over a high-performance network in a hybrid cloud environment.
iWave Software has released Storage Automator v6 as a means of automating provisioning and reclamation in the cloud. According to the company, it enables users to create their own private or public storage cloud out of the box using their current storage environments. It allows end users to provision their own storage via a service portal.
iWave Storage Automator includes: policy-based storage selection; a multi-tenant, self-service portal and catalog; end-to-end automated storage services; change control, scheduling and notification; various service level options and chargeback.
"Before iWave, storage automation resided within management consoles and custom storage scripts along vendor and product lines," said Ron Smith, vice president of marketing at iWave Software. "It ships with more than 50 pre-built adapters that provide connectivity to storage arrays, SAN switches, host operating systems, host hypervisors, network devices and ITIL service support."
iWave Storage Automator provides a multi-tenet portal and service catalog to provide an out-of-the-box private storage cloud solution for service providers and large enterprises. In the case of existing private cloud integration, iWave supports two options. The iWave Storage Automator Restful API allows integration into an existing cloud service providers' portals and processes. It can leverage the general-purpose iWave Orchestrator platform for delivering automation/orchestration of the storage workflows. This platform can be extended using iWave cloud services management services (self-service provisioning, automated disaster recovery, workload management and self-healing) to deliver a public or private cloud. General availability is planned for September 2012.
SolidFire is offering an all solid state storage system that has been built to scale out for large-scale could environments. But isn't that the same thing Texas Memory, Violin Memory and ExtremeIO are proposing? Jay Prassl, vice president of marketing at SolidFire, seeks to differentiate SolidFire's by drawing attention to the degree of control provided by SolidFire.
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4 Options to Make Your Cloud Storage Faster
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IT process automation will evolve from and replace workload automation (Shown: DEC Flip Chip assembly line, 1967) Image: Eric Fischer/Flickr
For the past 18 months or so, one of the recurring anecdotes that Ive heard has been around line of business staff engaging the public cloud to run projects without first engaging IT.
To business person, the advantage is being able to circumvent the IT project backlog, CAPEX controls and the IT department all together. The likely motivation is to accelerate project delivery and relieve the headache of internal red tape. To corporate performance, this can hurt the bottom line through the cost of un-optimized public cloud engagement and also through un-integrated project development and application management. To the IT organization, this deteriorates control of application and infrastructure processes and widens the gap between IT and the business.
Enterprise IT must move strongly to centralize cloud engagement or risk losing more than just control over application and infrastructure processes but, on a broader level, its relevance as a ready and effective partner to the business.
In an effort to regain control, IT departments are making efforts to move toward a service model, where computing capacity is perpetually available for every changing need of a dynamic organization.
For some, the answer is private cloud. However, many are finding similar CAPEX and management challenges to the ways of the past where servers were provisioned internally for peak demand. For others, its a move to public cloud. However, the majority of those initiatives are young and recent research from Enterprise Management Associates indicates that 70% of IT organizations had to redo or rethink cloud initiatives after initial deployments.
Whatever the case, the need for centralized cloud engagement and overall centralized management of applications and infrastructure remains. Crack that nut and a cascade of benefits awaits.
In the rush to cloud, what many companies are missing is the larger opportunity that is created by a simple layer that spans all computing needs the workload itself. The workload is core to centralization (and regaining control). Consolidating the organization-wide computing workload requirements onto one platform that can automate the delivery of computing capacity across a heterogeneous infrastructure is a key step toward the Holy Grail of IT-as-a-Service.
Cloud is critical in this process as it helps optimize resource utilization to workload demands. Private, public, hybrid or uber it doesnt matter. Workloads need to run and it is ITs job is to ensure sufficient capacity to meet workload demands while exceeding SLAs.
As alluded to earlier, companies used to provision servers and resources for peak demand and paid the price for underutilization during low workload demand. Cloud provides the ability to match workload demand with capacity supply in a pay for what you consume model. IT process automation (ITPA) is required to ensure the capacity curve tracks closely to the workload demand curve, effectively eliminating the costs associated with idle assets between workload bursts.
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Automatic for the Cloud: ITPA Delivers Continuity