Storage architectures and the cloud

Editor's Notes

• #3: This is my career in storage. I have cloudwashed this however I think its an interesting way of looking back at experiences, and how things are both changing and in many ways remain the same.
• #4: The fact is Public Cloud was the gateway to setting a new standard in how to run a Data Center. The Public Clouds built their businesses on providing maximum efficiency and flexibility of their data center resources This created a new benchmark for how IT is delivered.
• #5: The model of dedicated resources to specific groups in your organization was fine (10 years ago), but today it equates to poor utilization of resources and increased management/administrative head-aches How the same challenge is often true in service providers or companies that went to shared platform models early on Silos of clouds remain and often it can be difficult to move between them. This is what I think CloudStack, OpenStack & Open source clouds can help resolve, using community innovation and standard APIs
• #6: We’re moving from a world of isolated users, stifled by isolation and manual administration To one of shared resource pools available in real time using self service tools
• #7: There’s a lot of different buzzword’s that are used to describe all of this. The bottom line is regardless of what the “name” what we’re talking about is the “Next Generation Data Center” We need agility, scalability and automation, ideally on predictable platforms that deliver on their promises
• #8: And while application development and delivery is changing (the devops model) Fundamentally there is a huge opportunity in moving traditional and existing applications into more efficient infrastructures
• #9: So when I meet customers both in the service provider space, and those enterprises that want to act like service providers I see people asking themselves, vendors and those around them the big directional questions. Enterprises that see the benefits inherent in the Amazon-style approach are particularly asking themselves questions here. If we then think about CloudStack & Cloud Automation platforms in general how do they address that? And where does OpenSource win above buying everything in?
• #10: Community and open source can fix that Ultimately as a vendor we need to come together with everyone and raise the bar for all i.e. MikeT regularly converses with NetApp and other vendors to improve the overall quality of storage code in cloudstack It means everyone can take advantage of these improvements regardless of
• #11: So going back to the things we defined earlier what particularly does storage need to offer to enable people to move to these highly automated, “As a Service platforms”? And does it really matter any more when you are buying things as a service?
• #12: You need the same flexibility and efficiencies from your hardware that you gain from your Cloud Automation platform Otherwise you’re only part way there Trying to force fit products that aren’t designed to work rarely ends well I hear this debate frequently here and its why meetups like this are so useful
• #13: These 5 elements are what solidfire have defined as the benchmark and that we have built into our product. I am going to focus on just the first three today.Personally I think these are the most critical – Scale – Guaranteed/Predictable performance and automated management. I think they are what matter for storage that goes into CloudStack. Whether you like what we do, or use someone elses storage, these are the things I would be push to bring into your platform.
• #14: Rack growth vs single system growht SolidFire Scale OUT Limited to the performance of the controller design Controller upgrade, or new controller pair, to increase performance New controller = data migration Sprawling controllers = managing more islands of storage Prone to noisy-neighbor problems & performance degradation Controller based shared-disk systems can be SPF w/o full redundancy. Generational upgrades are huge headache Scale UP Performance doesn’t degrade as capacity is added Scale UP or DOWN by adding and removing nodes No data migration, no downtime, no increase in management burden Incrementally scale w/wide range of capacity and performance points No disks shared between shelves, no SPF Self-heal without the requirement for “extra” redundant components Simple hardware upgrades, easily incorporate new hardware
• #17: To deliver predictable and guaranteed storage performance, SolidFire leverages a technology called Performance Virtualization which virtualizes performance resources in very much the same manner that capacity is virtualized today. Patented by SolidFire, this technology allows administrators to manage storage performance separately and independently from storage capacity. With SolidFire IT managers have unprecedented control over their storage system, and are able to deliver predictable storage performance to thousands of applications within a shared infrastructure. Because performance and capacity are managed independently, you can create small volumes with extremely high performance, and very large volumes with very low performance. This allows you to provide predictable storage performance to a very broad number of applications. On the right is a view of how volume level performance is set within the SolidFire storage system Settings can be established for Min, Max, and Burst ensuring that applications get exactly the performance they require (next slide)
• #19: Yet what makes SolidFire storage management really compelling is the ability to automate every aspect of the storage system. At the core of the product is a complete REST-base API, which enables not only complete automation but deep integration of SolidFire capabilities such as the management of storage performance separate from storage capacity, and the ability to articulate SolidFire’s fine-grain storage performance controls …and through this API we provide deep integration with the leading cloud orchestration and monitoring tools to make it easy for you to manage and provision storage resources, gather detailed usage data and granularly monitor and report on each component and user.
• #20: Its not just automation that matters though, you need simplicity in the first place. I found that storage became quite complicated and while there very beneficial tools that vendors had developed around backup were useful, they often stifled platform innovate or create lock-ins. At SolidFire we focus on the simplicity and letting people get value from the elemental changes in our platform. If you don’t have to design many of the things above it leaves you free to innovate elsewhere in your stack. It means you aren’t locked in.