Integrate Cloud Storage with On-Premises Arrays
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Home MANAGING THE INFORMATION THAT DRIVES THE ENTERPRISE STCastagna: Storage’s ORAGE fourth dimension Toigo: Storage management gets SNAPSHOT 1 EDITOR’S NOTE / CASTAGNA some respect Block storage still Storage’s fourth IntegratingIntegrate a cloud cloud storage the focus of most dimension tier with on- premiseswith storage on-premises arrays storage purchases Block is still onUse top, a hybrid approach to add cloud storage but unified onservices the as a new tier to installed systems. rise CLOUD BACKUP STRATEGIES STORAGE REVOLUTION / TOIGO Today’s cloud Use cloud backup Storage management backup strategies to beef up data is alive and well protection Users seek big, fast and cheap storage With rising budgets, storage shops look SNAPSHOT 2 HOT SPOTS / BUFFINGTON to the cloud Users want capacity, Don’t let backup sap Buffington: Don’t performance VM performance let backup sap VM performance and low prices Matchett: Sailing the data lake PURCHASING INTENTIONS READ-WRITE / MATCHETT About us With more money to Choppy waters spend, storage pros stir up data lakes shop in the cloud JUNE 2015, VOL. 14, NO. 4 STORAGE • JUNE 2015 1 EDITOR’S LETTER RICH CASTAGNA Home Castagna: Storage’s fourth dimension Toigo: Storage SAY IT THREE TIMES FAST: “SOCIAL, MOBILE, CLOUD.” management gets Beyond third some respect And the reasons behind all this third platform and Web- platform and scale talk are the now all-too-familiar triumvirate—social, Integrating a cloud tier with on- mobile, cloud—that comes tripping off the tongues of premises storage Web-scale marketers and analysts alike. (When desperate, the same sloganeering gang will toss in the now classic “big data.”) Block is still on top, Almost everything that’s happening but unified on the in storage these days is about capacity But what’s wrong with that picture? Social, mobile and rise and economics. What happened to cloud don’t describe applications or data or any type of intelligence. They’re all places or environments where Today’s cloud intelligence? backup strategies something might happen. The emphasis seems to be on delivery, on being able Users seek big, fast and cheap storage to provide access to apps and data whether the person looking for those things is in the office, on the road or fe- With rising budgets, TECH ANALYSTS TAKE great joy in tossing around buzzy- verishly crunching numbers. Or avoiding that tough stuff storage shops look to the cloud sounding bon mots that are supposed to succinctly describe and being social instead. the current state of affairs in IT. But, most of those catch- If we believe what we hear, the IT scene is increasingly Buffington: Don’t phrases tend to confuse me more than shed light on knotty about where and how, and less and less about what or why. let backup sap VM performance tech issues. So, I’m not sure if we’re about to step onto or Still, the thing that seems to be getting short shrift is the off the “third platform“ of computing—in fact, I couldn’t data itself, and how that data is stored. Matchett: Sailing tell you what the other two platforms are. It’s almost as if it’s become irrelevant where the data the data lake “Web-scale” is another epithet that is threatening to resides. But that doesn’t make sense. We already know that About us take over IT parlance. It’s yet another supposedly new IT/ all roads lead to storage in one form or another and the data center paradigm. I’m a little lost with that term, too. trick is to find the best type and configuration of storage Although I figure the “scale” part is meant to describe media to keep the traffic running smoothly. But storage something really, really big, because you often hear “big can be more than the repository of all that hopefully valu- data” cited as one reason for companies to pump up their able corporate IP. It can be the center of a true information IT operations to “Web-scale” proportions. processing and management system. STORAGE • JUNE 2015 3 Home OUTSIDE LOOKING IN anymore. When there are more and more bits to shovel, it Castagna: Storage’s When we take a third-platform or Web-scale view, we’re gets harder and harder to know where those bits might be fourth dimension looking at the data and its apps from the outside, and most needed, when they’re useless and what they mean. of the developments in storage tech that we see today are Toigo: Storage management gets taking that external approach to solving what was an in- some respect ternal problem: We know we’re pushing around billions STORAGE IS GETTING SMARTER of bits every second, but we don’t really know what those So-called “data-aware” storage systems—like those from Integrating a cloud tier with on- bits are all about. innovative newcomers Data Gravity and Qumulo—have premises storage the potential to shake up the storage space race. They break new ground by getting inside the data to improve Block is still on top, but unified on the IF WE BELIEVE WHAT WE storage and data management. rise HEAR, THE IT SCENE IS Some of these new approaches represent significant im- provements over traditional storage systems and even over Today’s cloud INCREASINGLY ABOUT WHERE backup strategies AND HOW, AND LESS AND the new wave of software-defined and hyper-converged storage products. But, I think we’re still falling short of Users seek big, fast LESS ABOUT WHAT OR WHY. and cheap storage being truly data-aware—it’s more like data-capacity or data-activity aware. With rising budgets, Most of those new techs claim an advantage because For storage to be managed most effectively, the data storage shops look to the cloud they can “abstract” the storage software from the storage needs some intelligence of its own. Sophisticated new hardware. That in itself is kind of misleading. Software storage systems can watch over data and see how it’s Buffington: Don’t and hardware have always lived separate yet interde- being used, who’s using it and how often it’s being used, let backup sap VM performance pendent lives, and what software-defined storage—or but that’s probably not enough intelligence to make more software-defined anything—purports to do really isn’t any incisive determinations like when it can be used, when Matchett: Sailing different functionally. What’s different is the new model its usefulness has expired, under what circumstances it the data lake discourages vendors from creating custom hardware and should be used and so on. About us software which yield a proprietary architecture. That’s not a negligible point because it may cut costs, maybe even substantially. But it doesn’t make any fundamental DATA STORAGE TOWER OF BABEL changes to how data is managed—or not managed. In theory, the storage system could collect that informa- Without a lot more insight into the data than we tion and make it available. But, in the data processing currently have, we can’t just keep shoveling bits around cycle, that type of intelligence typically comes from the STORAGE • JUNE 2015 4 Home apps and users of those apps. Today, storage systems can’t an active partner for managing information, app makers Castagna: Storage’s collect that data, because apps, OSes, hypervisors, storage and storage vendors—and everyone in between—will fourth dimension systems and so on, speak different languages. have to start sharing what they know in a format that they Since IT began, there have been countless attempts at all can understand. Toigo: Storage management gets developing a lingua franca so apps and data systems can Until then, we’ll have to occupy ourselves buying big- some respect talk, exchange data and even share information about that ger and bigger disks, and building infinite clouds. Who data. Some have been successful like XML and DICOM knows—maybe common sense is just ahead waiting for Integrating a cloud tier with on- (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) while the rest of us to arrive on platform number four. n premises storage others not so much, like SNIA’s Cloud Data Management Interface. But for storage to really get smart enough to be RICH CASTAGNA is TechTarget’s VP of Editorial. Block is still on top, but unified on the rise Today’s cloud backup strategies Users seek big, fast and cheap storage With rising budgets, storage shops look to the cloud Buffington: Don’t let backup sap VM performance Matchett: Sailing the data lake About us STORAGE • JUNE 2015 5 STORAGE REVOLUTION JON TOIGO Home Castagna: Storage’s fourth dimension Toigo: Storage management gets Storage profiling, correlation and reduction, active reconfigu- some respect ration and so on. In short, useful capabilities that fall management outside the SNMP tool set. That is usually the reason why Integrating a cloud tier with on- we look to software developers to come up with better premises storage gets respect approaches… which we never buy. A couple of years ago, a lot of faith was placed in REST- Block is still on top, SRM has been overlooked over the ful management. Everybody promised to REST-enable but unified on the years, but vendors are pushing storage rise their stuff, providing a means to collate and respond in management software development. real time to application, network, server or storage events. Today’s cloud backup strategies IBM called its effort Project Zero—which is appropriate since they did next to nothing with it.