ACCELERATING DIGITAL TRANFORMATION at a LOWER TCO THAN PUBLIC CLOUD Comparing On-Prem Object-Storage-As-A-Service with Public Cloud Storage Services
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ACCELERATING DIGITAL TRANFORMATION AT A LOWER TCO THAN PUBLIC CLOUD Comparing On-Prem Object-Storage-as-a-Service with Public Cloud Storage Services ABSTRACT This w hite paper provides businesses w ith information needed to compare the benefits of on-prem Object-Storage-as-a-Service pow ered by Dell EMC® Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS™) w ith public cloud storage services. The paper also demonstrates how a fair pricing comparison can be made from ostensibly different offers, by reducing and comparing at a single Cost of Service metric. July 2017 WHITE PAPER The information in this publication is provided “as is.” EMC Corporation makes no representations or w arranties of any kind w ith respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied w arranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC softw are described in this publication requires an applicable softw are license. EMC2, EMC, the EMC logo, and ECS are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective ow ners. © Copyright 2016 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 09/16, w hite paper, H15394.1 EMC believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change w ithout notice. EMC is now part of the Dell group of companies. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ........................................................................................................................ 4 ASSESSING PUBLIC CLOUD STORAGE......................................................................................... 4 Benefits of Public Cloud Storage.............................................................................................................4 Challenges with Public Cloud Storage ....................................................................................................5 OBJECT-STORAGE-AS-A-SERVICE: A CRITICAL ENABLER FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION ............................................................................................................................... 5 Features of Object-Storage-As-A-Service ..............................................................................................5 ADVANTAGES OF OBJECT-STORAGE-AS-A-SERVICE OVER PUBLIC CLOUD STORAGE ................................................................................................................................................. 6 Lower TCO Than Public Cloud ................................................................................................................6 Advanced Capabilities At No Extra Cost.................................................................................................9 Consumption Flexibility ............................................................................................................................9 Reduced Data Residency and Compliance Risks ..................................................................................9 Built for Global Nature of Business Today ............................................................................................10 Flexibility for Application Developers ....................................................................................................10 Capabilities for Increased IT Agility .......................................................................................................10 Geo-Protection of Data ..........................................................................................................................10 Utility/Opex Based Payment Options ....................................................................................................10 KEY USE CASES FOR OBJECT-STORAGE-AS-A-SERVICE POWERED BY ECS ............. 11 CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................................................ 12 APPENDIX: ECS COST-TO-SERVE MODEL ................................................................................. 13 3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Digital Transformation is changing today’s business landscape, w ith technology helping organizations provide customers w ith new services and products. Digital Transformation offers an opportunity for strong, long-term grow th through new business-models, new revenue streams, and ultimately more satisfied and engaged customers. Companies that are able to harness digital technology to transform themselves w ill flourish. On the other hand, laggards w ill run the risk of experiencing rapid market disruption, and being marginalized by fast moving competitors. The new w orld of Digital Business, along w ith the advent of the Internet of things (IoT), Big Data, Automation and development of cloud-native w eb and mobile applications has resulted in the proliferation of data, w hich is rapidly becoming a critical asset for businesses. These new applications are not only disrupting traditional business models, but also generating unprecedented amounts of data. IDC estimates that data is roughly doubling every tw o years. By 2017, 80% of this data w ill be of the unstructured variety. The nature of unstructured data makes it unsuited for traditional storage platforms. Object storage introduces a new architecture that manages data as objects in one global flat system containing rich metadata, as opposed to file systems architectures, w hich manage data as a file hierarchy. As organizations use storage to capture, store and use vast amounts of unstructured data, they are faced w ith challenges of complexity at scale, increasingly long provisioning times, and redundant layers of technology for resilience and global access. In the face of these challenges, public cloud storage offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and others have quickly become a very popular option for storing and accessing data. How ever, despite its many advantages - low up-front investment, negligible set-up time, and on-demand capacity – public cloud storage poses its ow n unique challenges, especially at high storage capacity levels. IT organizations must w eigh the costs and benefits of consuming cloud storage from the public cloud or deploying an on premis es object storage solution. Considerations span a variety of factors, such as capacity, capability and economics. Additionally, organizations should take into account latency, predictability of expenses, centralized compliance and governance of data, etc. This paper aims to help organizations understand the implications of utilizing public cloud storage vs. an on-premises object storage platform. The paper compares a leading public cloud storage offering w ith an on-premises storage-as-a-service offering built w ith Dell EMC’s Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS). As Dell EMC’s third generation object-based storage platform, ECS is uniquely suited to help create an Object-Storage-as-a-Service offering, at price points low er than those of major public cloud storage vendors. Additionally, ECS provides the significant technological advantages over public cloud storage environments as a platform for cloud-native applications. ASSESSING PUBLIC CLOUD STORAGE In many organizations, IT plays a critical role in the embrace of Digital Transformation. How ever, in cases w here IT cannot move fast enough to meet the needs of the business, it can also be seen as a roadblock to the same transformation. Often, the difference betw een the tw o lies in the technology infrastructure, w ith storage being a critical differentiator, especially in light of the explosion in amount of data being generated by todays’ digital businesses. Traditional storage platforms, w hile still a critical part of any organization’s IT infrastructure, are beset by a number of challenges, w hich w hen taken together can lead to a lack of agility in responding to business needs. It’s no surprise that business units (BUs) end up looking to public-cloud vendors for their needs, leading to instances of “Shadow IT” cropping up in various parts of the company. Public cloud storage offerings such as AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, etc. have seen rising adoption over the last few years ow ing to a variety of reasons. BENEFITS OF PUBLIC CLOUD STORAGE Ease of provisioning: Public cloud providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure have significantly low ered the barriers to getting IT infrastructure up and running. Through use of self-service portals, organizations often need nothing more than a credit card to get started. Elasticity to scale: With the public cloud, organizations can scale up by adding more storage as their data grow s. Capacity can be easily added by using the providers’ self-service portal, and the added storage is usually available for immediate use. 4 Low upfront costs: One of the most commonly cited benefits of public cloud storage is the ability to spin up large amounts of storage capacity w ithout the need for large upfront investments or CAPEX (capital expenditure). This can be an enormous benefit for small businesses or startups that typically do not have as much cash on hand as enterprise organizations. Flexibility of Utility Pricing Model: In the public cloud, organizations only pay for the storage they use. Therefore, if they are consuming only 6 TB of storage, that’s w hat they w ould have to pay for. Organizations that are not expecting to utilize a lar ge amount of storage