Build aHybridStorageCloud services and possible pitfalls. This guide can help you make thosedecisions. services make pitfalls.Thisguidecanhelpyou andpossible products, ontheavailable choicesandeducate themselves tomake require users data bothofthesemethodsstoring ofusingthecloudforstorage; common way couldbecomethemost Combining publiccloudservices andon-premisesstorage VIRTUALIZATION CLOUD APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT NETWORKING STORAGE ARCHITECTURE DATA CENTER MANAGEMENT BUSINEss INTELLIGENCE/APPLICATIONS DISASTER RECOVERY/COMPLIANCE SECURITY S MOD HYBRID CLOUD 4 PROS A HYBRID CLOUD 3 S HYBRID CLOUD 2 NoT EDITor’s 1 Guide An Essential TILL HASW TORAG N E D CO PRODU E N E AK S SP C TS OTS E L EDITor’S NOTE 1 Building the Bridge: Making Hybrid Clouds a Reality IT managers who want to take advantage of com- awareness and bandwidth issues are among the items Home petitive cloud pricing, and the promise of elasticity that will factor into the decision process. While pub- that comes with public clouds, will almost always be- lic cloud storage brings the potential for big savings, it Editor’s Note gin their journey to the cloud with a hybrid model. A also presents latency problems; private cloud storage hybrid cloud model is not only the most likely start- is limited to private data centers and it requires the IT Hybrid Cloud ing point for an organization, but it is also often the manager to guarantee scalability at a time when unprec- Storage Products framework they decide on as a lasting strategy. That’s edented volumes of unstructured data are produced. because it allows a combination of on-site cloud storage this Essential Guide to building a hybrid storage cloud Hybrid Cloud Pros and Cons and public cloud storage to accommodate varying needs offers sophisticated analysis, discusses hybrid cloud throughout an organization for data access and speed of storage models for various needs, and answers key Hybrid Cloud Model delivery. questions about how to guarantee maximum benefits as Still Has Weak Spots although simplicity of management is a key selling your hybrid cloud projects become a reality. n point for many cloud projects, IT managers on the front lines know that hybrid models require careful consid- Ellen O’Brien eration and research. Gateway appliances, geographic Executive Editor, SearchCloudStorage.com 7 3 2 Build a HyBrid Storage Cloud PRODUCTS 2 Hybrid Cloud Storage Products Following the widespread adoption of server soon see accelerated adoption of cloud storage in the Home virtualization, cloud computing is the next evolution- enterprise. ary step toward utility computing where computing Editor’s Note resources are consumed like electricity and paid for based on usage. Cloud storage got off to a running CLOUD STORAGE DEFINED Hybrid Cloud start with Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), When a technology gets as hot as cloud computing is Storage Products which was quickly followed by other offerings. How- right now, there’s a temptation by vendors to simply ever, security concerns and slow performance have take existing products and rebrand them as “cloud.” But, Hybrid Cloud Pros and Cons often overshadowed the benefits of cloud storage and generally, storage-area network (SaN) storage and net- hampered its adoption in the enterprise. Early adopters work-attached storage (NaS) can’t be considered cloud Hybrid Cloud Model included startups, development teams and consumer- storage simply because they offer shared storage. “SaNs Still Has Weak Spots facing data services, but cloud storage struggles to really don’t meet the cloud storage paradigm of dy- become a viable complement to data center storage. namic, flexible and elastic storage that’s allocated when Conservative by nature, corporate IT has viewed and where needed; from zoning, provisioning to world- public cloud storage as risky. But that’s changing— wide names, they’re pretty static in nature,” said Terri not because of a change in the perception of public McClure, a senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group cloud storage, but because of the emergence of inter- (eSg) in Milford, Mass. This is especially true for tradi- nal cloud storage offerings as well as solutions that tional, vertically scaled SaN and NaS offerings. Scale- safely allow extending on-premises data storage out block-based storage systems, like Hewlett-Packard with external cloud storage services. From a deluge (HP) Co.’s 3Par StoreServ array with its self-tuning of cloud computing-related offerings and heightened and load-balancing capabilities, are able to dynamically enterprise customer interest, to analyst predictions and spread loads across the SaN; scale-out NaS products extensive press coverage, all indications are that cloud are further along, but even those aren’t appropriate for 7 3 computing has reached an inflection point and we’ll large public storage clouds. 3 Build a HyBrid Storage Cloud PRODUCTS 2 For an offering to be considered cloud storage, it needs Cloud storage can provide close to 100% storage uti- to be: lization by eliminating the massive amounts of unused storage that are needed with traditional data storage for n■ Network accessible anticipated growth and peak loads. Besides the overall n■ Shared cost savings, scalability of cloud storage and its abil- n■ Service based and paid for by usage ity to transparently support base and peak loads are its n■ elastic, so it can dynamically shrink most appealing characteristics. Home and grow as needed n■ able to scale up and down on demand Editor’s Note PUBLIC STORAGE CLOUDS the primary use of cloud storage today is for un- Public cloud storage services are offered by a fast- Hybrid Cloud structured data, which is the fastest growing and most growing list of service providers: AT&t, Amazon, Storage Products voluminous content, causing the most administra- iron Mountain Inc., Microsoft Corp., Nirvanix Inc., tive pains. Cloud storage is less suitable for structured rackspace Hosting Inc. and many others. Their stor- Hybrid Cloud Pros and Cons data, which continues to live on traditional enterprise age infrastructure usually consists of low-cost storage storage. nodes with directly attached commodity drives with Hybrid Cloud Model an object-based storage stack that manages the dis- Still Has Weak Spots tribution of content across nodes. Data in the cloud is THE BENEFITS OF CLOUD STORAGE typically accessed via Internet protocols, mostly Repre- the benefits of using cloud storage for unstructured sentational State Transfer (reSt) and to a lesser degree data are compelling, starting with lower overall stor- Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Resilience and age costs. Being service based, there’s no storage hard- redundancy is achieved by storing each object on at ware to buy, manage and maintain, and depending on least two nodes. Usage is charged on a dollar-per-giga- the service, it can greatly reduce, if not eliminate, data byte-per-month basis and, depending on the service center and storage administrator costs. Cloud storage provider, there may be additional fees for the amount eliminates expensive technology refreshes that usually of data transferred and access charges. kick in three years to five years after the initial pur- Public storage clouds are designed for massive multi- chase, needed to either get state-of-the-art technology tenancy that enables isolation of data, access and secu- or simply to get around purchasing expensive support rity for each client. The type of content stored on public 7 3 contracts for older arrays. clouds ranges from static non-core application data and 4 Build a HyBrid Storage Cloud PRODUCTS 2 archived content that needs to be available, to backup enabling infrastructure that could be used by HP, one and disaster recovery data. Public cloud storage isn’t of its partners or even enterprises to offer it as a fully suited for active content that changes all the time. managed, pay-as-you-go cloud storage offering. the primary concern of using public cloud stor- an example of a private cloud storage offering is the age in the enterprise is security and, to some extent, Hitachi Data Systems Cloud Service for Private File performance. tiering. Based on the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP), it resides in the customer’s data center but is owned Home and managed by Hitachi. Besides an initial setup fee, INTERNAL STORAGE CLOUDS the customer pays for it by usage. Similarly, the Nirvan- Editor’s Note internal cloud storage runs on dedicated infrastructure ix Inc. Hybrid Node (hNode) provides a fully managed, in the data center and, as a result, addresses the two pay-as-you-go, internal cloud offering within the data Hybrid Cloud main concerns of security and performance, but oth- center, based on the same technology that powers the Storage Products erwise offers the same benefits of public cloud storage. Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network. internal storage clouds are usually for a single tenant, Hybrid Cloud Pros and Cons even though larger enterprises may use multi-tenancy features to segregate access by departments or office THE HYBRID CLOUD STORAGE MODEL Hybrid Cloud Model locations. Unlike their public cloud storage counter- While internal cloud storage addresses the concerns as- Still Has Weak Spots parts, scalability requirements are more modest, so sociated with public cloud storage, it’s certainly not the internal cloud storage offerings are more likely to have Holy Grail for unstructured data. To start with, these traditional storage hardware under the hood. A case systems aren’t designed to leverage existing internal in point is HP’s CloudStart, which combines HP serv- storage infrastructure. The fact they’re on-premises ers, storage and orchestration software into an internal means they require data center real estate, electricity, cloud storage infrastructure. HP CloudStart by itself rack space and cooling. Since internal cloud storage isn’t a private storage cloud offering because it lacks runs on dedicated hardware, it won’t be able to scale to the key element of being service based; instead, it’s the the degree public storage clouds can.