Software Defined Datacenter als 'route' naar het 3e IT platform

Editor's Notes

• #3: We all know that today’s world is creating massive amounts of data, evident by the amount of storage consumption. One way to look at how fast information is growing is EMC’s own Exabyte journey. It took EMC up to 2005 to ship a total of it’s first Exabyte. In 2010, EMC shipped its first Exabyte during the course of a year, only to be followed in Q3 2011 by its first Exabyte shipped in a quarter. With data growth continuing at an amazing pace, EMC hit it first Exabyte month in Q2 2013.
• #4: All of these trends are forming what is being the 3rd platform of IT Technology Evolution; what leading industry experts describe as the next generation platform, provides an architecture specifically designed to meet these demands and support billions of users and millions of applications. The 3rd platform provides the means to achieve cloud scale, speed, agility, mobility, and growth. <MORE CONTEXT> As we look back, the first platform was mainframes with thousand of applications and millions of users with end user devices of choice being proprietary terminals. The second platform is and was the internet and client servers with end user devices being the PC. This platform continues to support tens of thousands of applications and hundreds of millions of users. However, current architectures are being pushed and scaling this type of environment can be costly and ineffective. When we talk about the third platform in an enterprise setting, we’re really talking about the convergence of these forces and their powerful combination to serve as a foundational architecture for IT organizations. Beyond the individual trends, the seamless “combination” of these trends is becoming critical since it collectively represents an agile new IT fabric for applications, data centers and, most importantly, the user experience. According to  IDC, the third platform, will serve as the primary growth driver of the IT industry over the next decade, responsible for 75% of new growth as worldwide IT spending moves from $3.7 trillion in 2013 to more than $5 trillion in 2020.
• #5: Reduce Opex Freedom of Choice A Path to the Cloud
• #6: Reduce Opex Freedom of Choice A Path to the Cloud
• #7: So how do we help our customers embark upon this change - because incremental improvement won’t get us there. It requires a new approach one that leverages disruptive data center technologies.
• #8: In an effort to realize the 3rd platform benefits, enterprises are embracing the Software-Defined Data Center. The Software-Defined Data Center’s architectural approach enables enterprises to abstract, pool and automate all of their data center resources (compute, storage and network) and services to deliver on the promise of the 3rd platform. All the data center resources have abstracted from the underlying hardware to create shared pools of resources. With this approach we can truly build an adaptive data center. In order to be a truly Software-Defined Data Center, services must be automated across ALL components – server, storage, and network. Analysts estimate that enterprises have virtualized between 30-75% of their compute and 20% of their network infrastructure, but only 5-10% of storage infrastructure. This is due in part to the fact that, unlike network and compute, storage lacks a set of clearly defined protocols and standardization. To realize the full value of the Software-Defined Data Center, compute, network, and storage must all be virtualized.
• #10: ViPR enables you – for the first time – to manage heterogeneous storage environments, including third-party arrays and commodity storage. In fact, any standard API–driven storage can be managed by ViPR. But what makes ViPR unique, is that unlike previous implementations of storage virtualization, ViPR decouples the control path from the data path. By abstracting the control path, storage management operates at the virtual layer, which gives customers the ability to partition a storage pool into virtual storage arrays. This is analogous to partitioning a server into a number of virtual machines. Control path data services provide multi-tenancy, service cataloging, metering and monitoring across all arrays. EMC ViPR does not sit in the data path for file and block stores. This ensures applications can access storage and all its underlying value and data services embedded in the storage arrays—without performance degradation. It also enables administrators to centralize data provisioning and data management tasks, and allow applications to access file and block data. That’s storage virtualization without compromise. Once the VIPR Controller is implemented, ViPR can offer a host of data services. ViPR data services can be layered over both traditional and new storage and enable hybrid data types - all at cloud scale. Data services extract more value from your existing investments by shifting away from array-specific services to holistically meet SLAs, mixed workloads, and Big Data applications.  EMC ViPR offers:  The ViPR object data service provides the ability to store, access and manipulate unstructured data such as images, video, audio, and online documents as objects on file-based storage such as VNX, Isilon and NetApp storage systems without having to rewrite or rework existing file-based applications. The ViPR object data service is a software layer that works transparently with different hardware platforms. The HDFS data service gives organizations the ability to run analytics using well known industry Hadoop distributions on existing data stored across heterogeneous systems such as VNX, Isilon and NetApp arrays. With ViPR customers can begin to realize true cloud value – such as on-demand storage-as-a-service and higher-level data services
• #11: With ViPR, the storage layer can now be another programmatic virtual resource in the software-defined data center or SDDC. All data and resources managed by ViPR are accessible via the open API. An organization can easily integrate ViPR into their existing data center operations. ViPR provides specific VMware integration with interfaces into VMware VASA, vCenter Operations, and vCenter Orchestrator, including the vCenter Automation Center (vCAC). As a result, a vCenter administrator has end-to-end visibility from the virtual machine to physical storage, for example.
• #12: ViPR enables you to integrate with OpenStack too. It includes native support for the Swift object storage API and a Cinder plug-in for block. ViPR is also integrated with Microsoft through the VMware vCloud Automation Center.
• #13: Even if you having started down the software-defined data center path, EMC ViPR can help you if you are managing more than one Array.
• #14: For storage administrators today provisioning can be a time consuming, manual process. On average it can take 30 plus steps – per storage system to provision. For example for EMC block storage such as VNX or VMAX the storage administrator first identifies the host initiators and networks associated with them, as well as the right array and pools to use—either thick or thin—based on connectivity and storage needs. Next, the admin creates the volumes and the storage groups and applies the FAST policy. Then, the storage administrator creates the nested volume group and applies the masking view before checking to ensure the volumes are available to the host. This is a simplistic view and on average, it reduces 30 plus steps – per storage system. Provisioning today can be a time-consuming, repetitive labor intensive task.
• #15: ViPR automates the entire provisioning process. ViPR Abstracts Physical Storage into Single Virtual Storage Pool Through an easy-to-use portal, the storage administrator defines the storage environment that it wants ViPR to manage. ViPR scans available storage arrays, SAN switches, and data protection devices. ViPR then discovers and abstracts physical storage arrays with all their unique capabilities into a single pool of virtual storage. 
• #16: From here the Storage Administrator Define Virtual Arrays & Configure Policy-based Virtual Storage Pools. First an Admins creates Virtual Storage Arrays that are managed at the virtual layer according to automated policies. This approach is very similar to how server administrators create many virtual machines with unique characteristics from one or more physical servers. Remember these are abstract arrays where a Virtual Storage Array can span multiple physical arrays. Next the storage admins configure Virtual Storage Pools. Virtual Storage Pools are sets of storage capabilities required by unique application workloads. Rather than provisioning capacity on storage arrays, storage administrators give users the ability to subscribe to Virtual Storage Pools that meet their unique requirements.
• #17: By centrally automating storage, storage administrators minimize user-IT interactions, automate the process of identifying available storage capacity, and better map an application workload’s requirements to the right combination of software and hardware storage resources. Provisioning tasks that typically take days or weeks to complete are now done instantly. They shift from 1:1 manual provisioning to automated provisioning. On average, it reduces those 30 plus steps as to as little as 5 simple clicks for any storage request. On the left is the ViPR self-service user interface. ViPR provides the same level of automation and a simple self-service access model, but your customers don’t have to dumb down their infrastructure control AND the can maintain all the unique features and capabilities of their best-of-breed environment while keeping it on premise under their control. In this example, the user would select a host, assign a name, choose a consistency group and number of volumes and then click order. 5 clicks - Storage-on demand.
• #18: ViPR also makes storage management simpler. ViPR Monitoring and Reporting provides a simple way to manage storage resources, performance, and utilization including metering and chargeback. ViPR provides a single, composite view of data center storage topology by Virtual Storage Pool and Virtual Storage Array. For deeper insight and visualization across multi-vendor, traditional and Software-Defined Storage environments, ViPR integrates with the Storage Resource Management Suite. This extends you investments in ViPR by reporting on the underlying storage infrastructure managed by ViPR. It helps storage teams ensure service levels in both traditional and software defined storage environments. The suite tracks capacity consumption across the storage environment including the arrays that present capacity to ViPR to improve capacity planning and purchasing processes. It also monitors and reports on performance trends in ViPR environments to identify when service levels are not being met and provides end-to-end views of the storage infrastructure to simplify troubleshooting processes. Finally, it analyzes changes and monitors compliance with design best practices and the EMC Support Matrix to ensure your environment is always configured right to meet service levels. EMC ViPR and Storage Resource Management Suite share a common console to centralize management across heterogeneous storage environments designed to optimize today’s storage investments while putting in place an extensible environment to ease your transition to the third platform.
• #20: ViPR As mentioned earlier, one of the key attributes of cloud is the ability to deliver self-service access to storage. On the left is the Amazon Web Services interface where you can sign up and get access to Amazon S3. Pretty simple. It takes a few minutes and a couple mouse clicks to get access to storage. Why is Amazon able to provide such a simple interface? Because they have a very standard, homogeneous, vanilla infrastructure. That sameness allows them to automate provisioning and management and offer their service at scale. If you want to do something unique or custom, Amazon is more than happy to let you go elsewhere. Custom is not their model. Custom disrupts their cost-to-serve. Their business is commodity; they’ve reduced prices six times in the past few years. Enterprises don’t operate this way. Enterprise IT can’t say no to unique use cases as much as Amazon can. Enterprise IT needs control and security over their data. Enterprises often have a heterogeneous, best-of-breed, multi-vendor environment that fits all use cases. This makes it inherently more difficult to automate. This is the value of ViPR. All the storage resources we showed you how to automate earlier, are presented to users via a self service catalog. Users subscribe to services via a service catalog that meets their workload demands. The user does not need to know or care about the underlying hardware and software that is providing the data service to their applications. Storage is instantly available – on demand. The provides IT the ability to deliver public cloud capabilities on your existing infrastructure, that leverages the unique features and capabilities of your best-of-breed environment, and provides you with a rich on premises cloud storage service– with your IT security and control.
• #21: Let’s take a closer look at how this works. ViPR delivers storage to users and tenants via a service catalog. Users subscribe to a Virtual Storage Pool that meets their workload demands. The user does not need to know or care about the underlying hardware and software that is providing the data service to their application. For example, a user with a transactional workload would subscribe to a Virtual Storage Pool that features the characteristics of a high-performance block store such as EMC VMAX. A user with an online file and content sharing application would subscribe to a Virtual Storage Pool that features the characteristics of a distributed object or file-based storage cloud. When the customer selects that Virtual Storage Pool, EMC ViPR automatically provisions the right hardware and software to meet the need. Storage is instantly available—on-demand. This helps storage administrators minimize user-IT interactions, automate the process of identifying available storage capacity, and better map application workload requirements to the right combination of software and hardware storage resources—instead of the repetitive, time consuming, labor intensive task of provisioning storage manually. Enterprise IT can now provide access to storage in the same or less time than it takes to go to an external cloud vendor—all while utilizing their existing storage infrastructure.
• #23: ViPR Data Services are cloud-scale storage services, implemented in software, and layered over ViPR-managed arrays. ViPR Data Services unlock storage and data services from specific arrays , extends them across heterogeneous storage, and allows you to cloud-enable existing storage and data. Many customers want to deploy Web, mobile and/or cloud applications but can’t support them with their existing file and block based infrastructure. They may also have file and REST based applications that need to manipulate the same data. This results in a lot of data movement and maintaining multiple data stores. For the first time, organizations, via the ViPR data services, can extend object or HDFS storage to existing file based storage such as EMC VNX and EMC Isilon and third party file-based storage such as NetApp FAS. In addition, enterprises can deploy REST-based applications (based on S3, Atmos or OpenStack Swift) on their existing file-based storage. Customers can streamline workflows, reduce storage costs and support new 3rd platform applications (Mobile, REST-based Web apps) on existing infrastructure.
• #24: ViPR provides application portability and flexibility. ViPR abstracts storage hardware so an enterprise or ISV can write their application to any of those three APIs and it can run on any ViPR-managed file arrays and, in 2014, commodity storage platforms. And they can run that app without every having to re-write it – even if there are changes to the infrastructure. The ViPR Object Data: Offers deployment flexibility, no lock-in Full API compatibility Amazon S3, Openstack Swift, Atmos Reduces development costs Extends the value of applications and existing data
• #25: ViPR Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) Data Service. Provides the ability to use existing storage as a Big Data repository and extend queries and applications to existing data sources. This reduces the growth of dedicated analytics clusters and accelerates time to value of Big Data initiatives. The HDFS Data Service helps Transform storage into a Big Data repository Extend Big Data queries to new data sources Reduce data transfer time and bandwidth costs Reduce dedicated analytics cluster growth
• #27: As EMC helps customers are move from traditional storage to new software-defined environments, we must ensure we not only advance technology capabilities, but that we retain and extend management capabilities. In doing so, we drastically reduce management overhead, provide IT with a path to the 3rd platform while leveraging existing investments. By doing this we pave the way to next generation infrastructure. With EMC ViPR and EMC Storage Resource Management (SRM) customers can establish a solid foundation for bridging the gap between their current IT infrastructure and the 3rd platform. Together, they are a key enabler for IT transformation providing customers with the tools they need to abstract, pool and automate storage resources for delivering higher level services (ViPR) while continuing to manage and provide visibility into both the traditional and software-defined storage environments (SRM Suite).
• #28: The EMC ViPR community provides a single place to learn more about ViPR, download a trial version of ViPR at no change, access Developer resources, and get support from EMC Experts, other community members, and more.
• #31: Thank you.
• #32: We’ve mentioned that ViPR supports heterogeneous storage. In the first release of ViPR, support for standard EMC arrays – VMAX, VNX and Isilon – was announced as well as support for NetApp FAS In ViPR 2.0, we have added native support for EMC platforms – ScaleIO, VBLOCK, and the ECS Appliance as well as Hitachi Unified Storage VM (HUS VM) and Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform (VSP). Please note: At GA, a separate ViPR instance will be required for the ECS Appliance and Hitachi VSP will need an RFQ. Through the OpenStack Cinder drive, ViPR can now also manage a plethora of additional arrays, including Dell, IBM, Solidfire, Oracle and HP. With native support, ViPR’s support matrix is more robust and array discovery is automatic. Via OpenStack, while major capabilities are still supported, we are limited by OpenStack testing and some manual intervention is required for discovery. We will continue to move arrays from OpenStack supported to natively supported arrays as the market and customer dictate. Please reference the ViPR feature list for a complete list of supported arrays and features.