Tackling the information explosion requires bold new thinking and the abandonment of tried and tired methodologies.
Scale matters. On the subject of datacenter infrastructure, scale separates technology that allows a company to thrive from technology that constantly gets within the way because it crumbles under growth. Nowhere is scale more important than in terms of storage, and specially file storage. Files within the sort of email, documents, and other unstructured information make up 80% of enterprise data, and files grow at a faster rate than all other data types combined.
Cloud storage enables file synchronization at scale.
The rush to virtualize everything moved every file server into the SAN while forcing file-specific platforms, like NAS, to become dumb-block devices with an emphasis on performance and price in preference to on scale. But files failed to leave. While datacenters embraced virtualization, the file footprint continued to double every two or three years. Traditional storage, data protection, and replication strategies are running out of steam against the relentless growth of file data. Even the leanest IT organizations can expect their storage costs to continue rising at the same time as they upgrade their SANs and take a look at to enforce unpopular capacity quotas on their users.
I recently met the CIO of a big bank who have been asked to chop IT costs 8% per year. Internally, there has been a powerful push toward outsourcing or offshoring some core IT functions to reach these savings. He told the organization that this approach may reduce costs inside the short term, but that the savings would last for just one year, primarily by means of data growth. He has just over a petabyte under management and expects that number to achieve 2 PBs in 2015. Most of that data is files that are subject to lengthy retention policies by the financial regulatory bodies. He asked his staff to forestall fascinated with the right way to get monetary savings in small, incremental ways and, instead, to rethink their data storage strategy completely.
[Desire to learn more about newcomers in solving storage’s growth problem? See Separating Storage Startups From Upstarts.]
The core of any cloud storage system is an object store. Object stores power the biggest public clouds, like Amazon Web Services’ S3 and Microsoft’s Azure, in addition to one of the most private cloud storage systems from the likes of CleverSafe and EMC. The physical underpinning of any object store is a cluster of servers, a.k.a. nodes, each with its own direct-attached storage, each connected through Ethernet. The hardware used for the nodes is nothing special. The magic is all within the software.
An object store does something rather well: data replication reliably and at scale. The replication of the objects not just protects the info but additionally serves to amplify access to data by allowing objects to be read from many nodes within the cluster. This isn’t unlike the behavior of content distribution networks. a suitable object store core gives a company access to an enormous replication engine at a ridiculously low cost point.
But the thing store is simply 1/2 the tactic. The opposite half is a brand new generation of storage controllers that bridge the space to support traditional infrastructure workloads. Cloud-integrated storage (CIS) devices (often known as cloud gateways) from the likes of cTera, Nasuni, and Panzura appear and feel like traditional NAS devices and supply the identical advanced capabilities of traditional NAS.
But, behind the curtain, CIS devices transform every file and each file grow to be a different string of smaller files or objects which are then shipped to the thing store core. There, each object is instantly replicated among nodes and geographically dispersed across datacenters. By transferring the state in their file systems natively to the item store, these reinvigorated NAS platforms can scale to soak up an infinite collection of files or snapshots whatever the size of the device. Files which are synchronized to the article store core are immediately replicated and available anywhere on the earth, which enables shared access to files from multiple locations and full new easy methods to deliver disaster recovery and business continuity. It’s the scalable infrastructure version of private productivity applications like Dropbox and Box.
Scale changes everything. Organizations can expect dramatic and sustainable cost savings by shifting file data to cloud-based architectures. The bank i discussed above has chosen to deploy a 1.3-petabyte core object store with CIS appliances so they can replace their midrange storage controllers in dozens of locations. The system will create a unified storage platform that uses synchronization at scale to offer protection to and make data available to hundreds of locations all over the world. The associated fee savings that result from shifting to and growing in the new model will neutralize even probably the most aggressive data growth projections.
IT organizations have a tendency to be extremely conservative, but tackling the info explosion requires bold new thinking, and the abandonment of tried and tired methodologies.
Solid state alone can’t solve your volume and function problem. Think scale-out, virtualization, and cloud. Discover more concerning the 2014 State of Enterprise Storage Survey ends in the recent issue of InformationWeek Tech Digest.
Andres Rodriguez is CEO of Nasuni, a supplier of enterprise storage using on-premises hardware and cloud services, accessed via an appliance. He previously co-founded Archivas, a firm that developed an enterprise-class cloud storage system and was acquired by Hitachi Data … View Full Bio
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