As companies struggle to manage the data explosion in an era of tight IT spending, traditional approaches are failing while IT managers' blood pressure are rising. The presentation by 451 Research Group's Simon Robinson and Cloudian's Jay Desai covers enterprise IT's best strategy for solving its mounting storage woes: object storage.
Traditional approaches to enterprise storage such as SAN and NAS can be costly, especially for data that needs to be retained but is seldom accessed, while tape-based storage increasingly does not meet enterprise requirements in an 'on-demand' era. However, object-based storage systems are emerging as a new category in enterprise storage, allowing organizations to store vast quantities of data 'online,' and at a price point that won't break the bank.
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Why Object Storage Matters in Today's Storage Environment
1. Object Storage – an overview, and why it matters
Simon Robinson, Research Vice President
2. Company Overview
One company with 3 operating
divisions
Syndicated research, advisory,
professional services, datacenter
certification, and events
Global focus
200+ staff
1,300+ client organizations:
enterprises, vendors, service
providers, and investment firms
Organic and growth through
acquisition
3. Unique combination of research, analysis & data
Emerging tech market segment focus
Daily qualitative & quantitative insight
Analyst advisory & Go-to-market support
Global events
4. Agenda – the what and why of Object Storage
Introduction – data challenges in an age of austerity
Why object storage offers a different approach
How does object storage work?
Where might it fit in your environment?
Considerations when choosing a system and suppliers
5. Data is BIG, and getting BIGGER… but IT budgets are not
KB
1980s
MB
1990s
GB -TB
2000s
PB
2010s
ZB…?
2020s
6. Storage overhead remains a major challenge
What are your top storage-related pain points?*
n=249. *Note that due to multiple responses per interview, totals may exceed 100%.
Source: Storage – Wave 16 |
7. Not only more data, but…
…more devices, and ‘things’
…more unstructured data
…more data copies
…in more places
…more lawsuits and regulation
…and keep everything forever!
Time for a fresh look at storage infrastructure
8. Challenges with Traditional Enterprise Storage
Existing approaches have limitations:
SAN – $$$ and not designed for unstructured content
NAS – $$, and siloed
Tape - $, an ‘offline’ medium
Disk-based backup - $, hard to scale, not designed for archive
Plus:
Scale issues
Complex provisioning/management
Typically not ‘cloud friendly’
Backup and archive treated as one and
the same
Data needs to be stored on most cost-
appropriate platform
9. Storage is diverging
High capacity, low speed
disk
Cool, infrequently
accessed data
High speed solid
state storage (Flash)
Hot, frequently
accessed data
11. Let’s start with a definition
“An object store raises the level of abstraction presented by today's
block devices. Instead of presenting the abstraction of a logical
array of unrelated blocks, addressed by their index in the array (i.e.,
their Logical Block Address (LBA)), an object store appears as a
collection of objects. An individual object is a container of storage
(object-data and object-meta-data) that exposes an interface
similar to a file, and presents the abstraction of a sparsely allocated
array of bytes indexed from zero to infinity. “ IBM Research
12. What does this mean in Plain English?
In general, Object Storage:
Is optimized for fast growing but rarely changing and infrequently accessed ‘bulk’
content
Is generally simpler than traditional storage;
• Scale-out architecture – start small and grow to PB+
• ‘Self-managing’
• Requires less storage expertise
Utilizes commodity hardware - can be both low-cost and very dense
• Potentially lower energy costs and smaller datacenter footprint
Is accessed via APIs
• (though file gateways are available)
Frees up capacity on tier 1 storage
13. Understanding Object Storage – some common questions
Is object storage a new technology?
• Yes, and no
• Extensively used in healthcare (PACS)
• Object storage standard in cloud services
• Over 2 Trillion objects on Amazon S3
What’s the difference between File Storage (NAS)
and Object Storage?
• Self Parking vs Valet Parking
What’s so good about object-level focus?
• Object-specific metadata
• Object-specific data access
• Object-specific data protection
14. When should you consider Object-based storage?
You have lots (and lots) of files, and growing
• View it as NAS augmentation rather than replacement
• But the starting point can be relatively small
Planning a major storage refresh, new datacenter/consolidation project
Looking to reduce/eliminate tape infrastructure
• Transition to ‘online’ archive strategy
Developing cloud-based applications, and/or using private/public cloud
infrastructure services (eg AWS, OpenStack, CloudStack)
Significant mobile data access requirements and need a central storage facility
You’re starting to look at ‘Big Data’ projects
15. Key Evaluation Criteria
Choice of commodity hardware
Application compatibility
Easy to deploy and manage
Private cloud compatible
Data protection capabilities
18. (c) Copyright and Confidential, Cloudian Inc. 2013, All rights reserved.
Cloudian Company Overview
• Privately Held, VC-funded (Goldman Sachs)
• Offices in Silicon Valley, Japan & China
• Customers in US, Europe & APJ
• Software company focused on Cloud
Storage for Enterprise & Service Providers
• Expertise in Storage, Big Data, Enterprise
Software & Telco
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Cloudian Vision
Help organizations address their big data & cloud storage
challenges by providing software to build private or public
clouds using commodity servers.
Using Cloudian software, organizations will be able to
operate their storage clouds with minimal IT involvement.
Our approach will significantly reduce the cost of deploying
and managing large storage cloud environments making
“Storage-as-a-Utility” a reality!
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Cloudian – Software-Defined Storage
• Multi-Tenant, Object Storage Software
• Private or Public Cloud
• Full S3-API Compatibility
• Multi-Datacenter Capabilities
• Compatible with CloudStack & OpenStack
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Choose Your Preferred Hardware
• Cloudian is hardware agnostic
• Servers – Cisco, Dell, IBM, Supermicro, etc.
• Storage – Internal storage or network storage
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350+ Compatible Applications
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BACKUP & ARCHIVE
NAS GATEWAYS
CLOUD
FILE SYNC
& SHARE
23. (c) Copyright and Confidential, Cloudian Inc. 2013, All rights reserved.
Easy to Deploy & Manage
• Complete software package (Linux application)
• Self-managing, self-healing, self-replicating,
completely elastic
• Management console
– Multi-Tenant User management
– Self-service provisioning
– Usage reporting & chargeback
• Admin API to integrate into custom portals
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Multi-Datacenter Data Protection
• Node, Rack, Data-center aware replication
• Flexibility – synchronous, asynchronous or
quorum based
• Choice of number of copies
• Dynamic replication levels
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DC1 DC2 DC3
Multi-DC, Configurable Replication
25. (c) Copyright and Confidential, Cloudian Inc. 2013, All rights reserved.
Private Cloud Compatible
• Cloudian as Secondary
storage for OpenStack &
CloudStack
– Store ISO’s, Snapshots
& backups
• Provision Cloudian as
primary storage in an
OpenStack & CloudStack
deployment
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Test Drive Cloudian Object Storage Software
• Full feature evaluation software available for
download at www.cloudian.com/get-started.html
• Contact us with questions!
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We are interested on what’s happening at the bigger firms (not SMB, not consumers)The ‘consumerization’ of Enterprise IT
We are interested on what’s happening at the bigger firms (not SMB, not consumers)The ‘consumerization’ of Enterprise IT
Diverse group of clients: Buyers, sellers, investors, consultants – from the largest venerable company to the youngest seed company Investment bankers get the SAME Syndicated Research as a Software ConsultantWe are the RAW MATERIAL to your research
None of this mean disk will die.It means that between DRAM and tape, storage will split into flash for hot data, and disk for infrequently accessed data.Disk will not die because volumes show no sign of falling (20% plus at most enterprises), and disk will continue to fall in price.Where disk has been staggeringly successul is in price per GB, which has roughly followed Moore’s law for several years. Cramming more data per square inch will continue. Seagate has predicted 50TB drives in ten years (and we’re on 4TB at present).What will die is high-end “fast” disk drives, which simply arent fast enough, and for which the capacity increase will be irrelevent. Expect SAS and FC drives to reach cross-over point in $/GB within five years or so. Even before then, the $/GB will have nailed them.
Diverse group of clients: Buyers, sellers, investors, consultants – from the largest venerable company to the youngest seed company Investment bankers get the SAME Syndicated Research as a Software ConsultantWe are the RAW MATERIAL to your research
Diverse group of clients: Buyers, sellers, investors, consultants – from the largest venerable company to the youngest seed company Investment bankers get the SAME Syndicated Research as a Software ConsultantWe are the RAW MATERIAL to your research
Diverse group of clients: Buyers, sellers, investors, consultants – from the largest venerable company to the youngest seed company Investment bankers get the SAME Syndicated Research as a Software ConsultantWe are the RAW MATERIAL to your research