TVAR Solutions was awarded Fast Start Federal Partner of the Year (2011) at the Brocade Partner Summit in Las Vegas.
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The best thing about opinions is that everyone has one. The same is true for definitions of Cloud Computing! Cloud Storage is more than Storage on the Internet (or Intranet in the case of private clouds).
Cloud Storage is a storage service delivered over a network (internet or intranet): Data storage that is made available as a service via a network: NFS, CIFS, HTTP, WebDav, FTP, S3, REST, etc. Cloud Storage offers the ability to scale capacity and performance by adding hardware from your favorite vendor, and sharing it via a standard network. Depending on your requirements and budget, you can add features, resiliency and flexibility to your storage cloud.
How The National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines Cloud Computing:
Important Cloud Computing Requirements
Wikipedia Definition: "Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them."
The same applies to Cloud Storage, a subset of Cloud Computing that can stand as its own as a service, or be integrated into a Cloud Computing project. As IT infrastructure, Cloud Storage fits into the "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS) cloud computing paradigm. This is a virtualized blank page upon which you may build the underlying platform and every element or application required in your infrastructure.
TVAR Solutions has the technical expertise and manufacturer relationships to match your current, and future requirements, to the best solutions. And, we can provide a technical roadmap so that as your needs change, you can increase capacity, performance and add services.
Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (for example, networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
Easy to scale: Scaling is more than just capacity. Scaling must address effort and costs. Effort is reduced by the removal of the detailed provisioning tasks intrinsic to traditional storage. File systems can be expanded or contracted on the fly with a few keyboard strokes (or mouse clicks). Cloud-cost economies are driven via the use of commodity hardware and per usage pricing.
Easy to manage: a storage cloud is as easy to manage as if it is a single storage appliance.
Cloud Computing started with a simple idea - let someone else set up a computing infrastructure and let users tap into it, paying only for what they need. From this simple idea, a much more sophisticated, complex (and sometimes complicated) market has begun to grow. Today, organizations can buy just infrastructure, managed infrastructure, or infrastructure plus applications. In the language of this market, the infrastructure is frequently referred to as platform and the applications as Software as a Service (SaaS). In fact, variations of the acronym appear everywhere from SaaS to PaaS (Platform as a Service) to XaaS (Anything as a Service).
The following is a list of characteristics of a cloud-computing environment. Not all characteristics may be present in a specific cloud solution.
Elasticity and scalability: Cloud computing gives you the ability to expand and reduce resources according to your specific service requirement. For example, you may need a large number of server resources for the duration of a specific task. You can then release these server resources after you complete your task.
Pay-per-use: Pay for cloud services only when you use them, either for the short term (for example, for CPU time) or for a longer duration (for example, for cloud-based storage or vault services).
On demand: demand: Because you invoke cloud services only when you need them, they are not permanent parts of your IT infrastructure-a significant advantage for cloud use as opposed to internal IT services. With cloud services there is no need to have dedicated resources waiting to be used, as is the case with internal services.
Resiliency: The resiliency of a cloud service offering can completely isolate the failure of server and storage resources from cloud users. Work is migrated to a different physical resource in the cloud with or without user awareness and intervention.
Multitenancy: Public cloud services providers often can host the cloud services for multiple users within the same infrastructure. Server and storage isolation may be physical or virtual-depending upon the specific user requirements.
Workload movement: movement: This characteristic is related to resiliency and cost considerations. Here, cloud-computing providers can migrate workloads across servers-both inside the data center and across data centers (even in a different geographic area). This migration might be necessitated by cost (less expensive to run a workload in a data center in another country based on time of day or power requirements) or efficiency considerations (for example, network bandwidth). A third reason could be regulatory considerations for certain types of workloads.
The major difference is that cloud storage is provided as a service to the application owners and users, and may be used by various projects or organizations. Also, the connection to the Cloud Storage is based on network protocols, whereas enterprise storage was traditionally accessed directly using block protocols over dedicated storage area networks.
If the existing storage is network attached, the transition is easy. Various methods including Global Name Space appliances can be used to insert a storage virtualization layer between the applications and the storage. If the existing storage is block based, then the applications need to be adapted to take advantage of network storage. The Good news is that any enterprise application, from web service to relational database, can be used with network attached storage.
Many organizations do not yet know how a cloud fit into their organization.
A primary disadvantage for many companies in setting up private clouds is the costs associated with reusing existing decommissioned hardware: cost to power, cost to maintain, support contracts, etc...
There are many published opinions and dedicated websites that cover security of public cloud offerings. The bottom line is it comes down to control of your data. Public clouds are just that-public. Isolation of data is only as strong as the virtualization technologies used to build the cloud and the provider's firewall. If you are at all concerned about the data being outside of your company it should not be in a public cloud.
Private clouds are owned, deployed and managed by internal employees. Data is isolated based on your requirements and security is based on internal processes.
Similar to security, confidentiality of data is a factor to consider when choosing a cloud storage solution. The law is defined based on control of the data. If the service provider is subpoenaed for your data based on their control of the data, they must comply regardless of your knowledge or objections.
With private clouds you maintain control and have input, or at least knowledge of legal activities. When it comes time to destroy or delete the data, it is in your power and can be confirmed by your own team.
James Urquhart has compiled a set of criteria for workload migration across multiple locations, one of which is "Follow the law." Consider the case of a cloud services provider or operator that has data centers in two separate countries. The operator might use the data centers for workload migration as well as load balancing. A problem might arise if the laws in one of the countries impose limitations on what can and cannot be done at the data center. Scenarios include access to all data stored at this data center by authorities or the ability to examine all transactions on the wire at the data center. Workload migration policy statements have to be provided to cloud users so that they understand what they are signing up to. Alternatively, they might be provided the ability to set preferences for workload migration. This area is potentially worrisome, so it is important that cloud users are aware of their specific situation. [18] "The great paradigm shift of cloud computing is not self-service," James Urquhart
It shouldn't be hard at all. Cloud Storage manufacturers have dramatically reduced the resources required to implement and manage very large environments.
Public cloud offerings typically include replication of data to multiple geographically dispersed locations, sometimes for an extra fee. If your users are global and can benefit from locality of data, a public cloud can sometimes substitute for a content distribution network.
Private clouds are typically deployed in a single location for LAN based access. Remote users will need to connect over the WAN and work with internet type latencies. Larger private cloud deployments can include multiple locations and start to approach the public cloud distribution, albeit at a higher initial investment.
Very. Cloud Storage offerings provide multiple points of access, multiple copies of files, and multiple physical locations for the data. They are resilient to operator error, software or hardware malfunction, physical disasters and other disruptions. This is not to say the protection of data is guaranteed from all threats in any single solution. Often times, backup and offsite architectures need to utilized along with the primary storage solution to fully protect the organizations data.
Storage plays a major part in the data center and for cloud services, especially in environments with virtualization. Storage can be locally attached or accessible through a network-the most popular storage network technologies being Fibre Channel and Ethernet. For such network access of storage, servers are equipped with Fibre Channel or Ethernet adapters through which they connect to a Fibre Channel or Ethernet switch. The switch provides the connectivity to storage arrays. Fibre Channel is more popular, though Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices with Ethernet interfaces also have a strong presence in the data center. Another Ethernet-based storage option is the Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI), which is quite popular among smaller data centers and enterprises because of the cost benefits. This technology involves running the SCSI protocol on a TCP/IP-over-Ethernet connection.
Fibre Channel connections to the storage network necessitate two types of network technologies in the data center: Ethernet for server-to-server and server- to-client connectivity and Fibre Channel for server-to-storage connectivity. A recent initiative in data-center technology is a converged network, which involves the transport of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). FCoE removes the need for each server to have a Fibre Channel adapter to connect to storage. Instead, Fibre Channel traffic is encapsulated inside an Ethernet frame and sent across to a FCoE gateway that provides Ethernet-to-FCoE termination to connect to Fibre Channel storage arrays (refer to Figure 3). Some storage products provide FCoE functions, so the Ethernet frame can be carried all the way to the storage array. An adapter on the server that provides both "classical" Ethernet and FCoE functions is known as a Converged Network Adapter (CNA). Cloud-computing environments can reduce the data-center network complexity and cost through this converged network environment.
Another Storage Networking technology is the ATA over Ethernet (AoE), a simplification of storage networking by using layer-2 Ethernet protocols as the container for ATA storage commands. AoE provides tremendous increases in performance that are well suited to virtualization and cloud storage.
Private clouds are deployed inside the firewall and accessed over the Ethernet LAN at wire speed. It is not uncommon to have read access in the 100 MB/s range per node. Adding nodes provides additional performance to the cloud. Files can be replicated to many nodes, each of which can serve requests independently.
Public clouds are accessed over the Internet and face the limits of both your and the provider's bandwidth connection. This is usually capped around 10MB/s. To scale performance you can initiate additional 10MB/s connections, but doing so increases the bandwidth charges.
A public cloud is offered as a service, usually over an internet connection. Private clouds are deployed inside a firewall and managed by the user organization.
Yes. When the private cloud is based on the same access protocols as the public cloud offerings, moving operations to the public cloud is easily accomplished. Many organizations are automating their resource usage, and have contingencies to expand to public clouds for their needs when their capacity is exceeded by their private cloud infrastructure.
Outsourcing your entire IT infrastructure to a cloud provider makes sense if your deployment is a "green field" one, especially in the case of a startup. Here, you can focus on your core business without having to set up and provision your IT infrastructure, especially if it primarily involves basic elements such as e-mail, word processing, collaboration tools, and so on. As your company grows, the cloud-provided IT environment can scale along with it.
Another scenario for cloud usage is when an IT department needs to "burst" to access additional IT resources to fulfill a short-term requirement. Examples include testing of an internally developed application to determine scalability, prototyping of "nonstandard" software to evaluate suitability, execution of a one- time task with an exponential demand on IT resources, and so on. The term cloud bursting is sometimes used to describe this scenario. The cloud resources may be loosely or tightly coupled with the internal IT resources for the duration of the cloud bursting. In an extremely loosely coupled scenario, only the results of the cloud bursting are provided to the internal IT department. In the tightly coupled scenario, the cloud resources and internal IT resources are working on the same problem and require frequent communication and data sharing.
In some situations cloud computing does not make sense for an enterprise. Regulation and legal considerations may dictate that the enterprise house, secure, and control data in a specific location or geographical area. Access to the data might need to be restricted to a limited set of applications, all of which need to be internal. Another situation where cloud computing is not always the best choice is when application response time is critical. Internal IT departments can plan their server infrastructure and the network infrastructure to accommodate the response-time requirements. Although some cloud providers provide high- bandwidth links and can specify Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) (especially in the case of SaaS) for their offerings, companies might be better off keeping such demanding applications in house.
An interesting variation of these scenarios is when companies outsource their web front ends to a cloud provider and keep their application and database servers internal to the enterprise. This setup is useful when the company is ramping up its offerings on the web but is not completely certain about the demand. It can start with a small number of web servers and scale up or down according to the demand. Also, acceleration devices such as Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs) can be placed in front of the web servers to ensure performance. These devices provide server load balancing, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) front ends, caching, and compression. The deployment of these devices and the associated front-end infrastructure can be completely transparent to the company; it only needs to focus on the availability and response time of its application behind the web servers.
Your security or requirements may change and so use of a private cloud is no longer mandatory. A cost analysis may show that public clouds offer the same service at less cost. Re-Organization and consolidation may force a public cloud service to merge with a previously private cloud. Of course, these transitions can also happen in the other direction, with the service moving from a public cloud to a private cloud.
Cloud-computing technology is still evolving. Various companies, standards bodies, and alliances are addressing several remaining gaps and concerns. Some of these concerns follow:
Security: Security is a significant concern for enterprise IT managers when they consider using a cloud service provider. Physical security through isolation is a critical requirement for private clouds, but not all cloud users need this level of investment. For those users, the cloud provider must guarantee data isolation and application security (and availability) through isolation across multiple tenants. In addition, authentication and authorization of cloud users and encryption of the "network pipe" from the cloud user to the service provider application are other factors to be considered.
Network concerns: When cloud bursting is involved, should the servers in the cloud be on the same Layer 2 network as the servers in the enterprise? Or, should a Layer 3 topology be involved because the cloud servers are on a network outside the enterprise? In addition, how would this work across multiple cloud data centers?
Cloud-to-cloud and Federation concerns: concerns: Consider a case where an enterprise uses two separate cloud service providers. Compute and storage resource sharing along with common authentication (or migration of authentication information) are some of the problems with having the clouds "interoperate." For virtualized cloud services, VM migration is another factor to be considered in federation.
Legal and regulatory concerns: concerns: These factors become important especially in those cases involving storing data in the cloud. It could be that the laws governing the data are not the laws of the jurisdiction where the company is located.
Virtualization technologies, server-hosted desktop virtualization is one example, are affected by the cloud, specifically in the areas of network connectivity, authentication, and quality of experience. In general, any thin-client experience is affected by the cloud or data center because most of the work is done at the servers. From a cloud perspective, these types of virtualization schemes are considered to be applications that need to run reliably and consistently.
Cloud Computing and specifically IaaS has provided a flexible model, in which you are charged based on compute power usage, storage consumed, and the duration of usage. However, there is another important factor-data needs to be sent back and forth between the cloud user and cloud service provider. Several IaaS providers charge for the amount of data transferred over the link. These charges can quickly add up if your applications are very chatty and require a lot of back-and-forth data traffic. Another concern here is the amount of time the initial upload or download can consume-for example, when you want to move a large number of your files to the IaaS provider's storage, you can tie up the link for hours. In fact, one provider has a model where cloud users can send storage media through a postal or package service for upload to the cloud provider's storage arrays.
How long you plan on keeping data in the cloud can greatly impact your selection. As data ages within the public cloud, the cost continues to rise. If you are publishing frequently changing or short-lived content such as movie trailers or daily newscasts, the flexibility of a public cloud is a good solution.
Private clouds are licensed like enterprise software. Longevity of data does not increase the cost of the solution, which bodes well for archive or content repository applications.
That depends. Service levels, performance, availability, local access, data- center power, space and cooling, all impact the best choice of storage. Storage providers are constantly improving their products, adding features and improving manageability, reliability and serviceability. Cloud storage practices can allow for a heterogeneous storage environment, with the platforms deployed over time from different vendors, but the access methods based on the same network standards.
Files in a cloud need to be protected. Various versions of the files, taken over time, should be available. The files should exist in multiple locations to protect from a local disaster. They should be protected from inappropriate erasure, so tape or write-once/read-only media may be used; but the files should not exist past their defined retention period. The files should be characterized with checksums or some other method to ensure that they are not corrupted over time.
Additionally, Storage Clouds are becoming much larger than the typical infrastructure to restore the data following a catastrophic loss using the same networks, tape-drives and infrastructure that was used to back the Cloud up. Consider a 3 PB Storage Cloud (not uncommon these days). Recovery of 3PB in a 48-hour period would take 266 tape drives (each reading at 140MB/s ignoring the processing times and tape movement introduced by the backup software). Most organizations cannot afford either a 48-hour Recovery Time or the tape library infrastructure to recover the site faster.
So there is no simple way to recommend a single solution to backup a cloud. TVAR Solutions works with our storage partners to provide the infrastructure components to protect your data and allow you to restore your cloud to full operation following a disaster.
Numerous standards bodies are involved in cloud computing, addressing aspects of interoperability, virtualization migration formats, and security. Some of the organizations involved have established liaisons with the other Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) so that there is no duplication of effort.
The Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF) has specified a portable format for packaging the software to run as a VM. Known as the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), this package format is seeing increased use. The VM can be written onto storage and can be moved from one physical machine to another. The DMTF has also formed a group called the Open Cloud Standards Incubator, which focuses on standardizing the interactions between cloud environments, including the development of resource management, packaging formats, and security.
The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is a new group formed to address security aspects of cloud computing with a focus on security assessment and management. The initial part of the effort is on developing an Audit, Assertion, Assessment and Assurance (API) set (A6).
The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) sees cloud computing as an extension of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) used today in IT environments. The areas for standardization include security and policy, content format control, registry and directory standards, as well other SOA methods.
The Storage Networking Industries Association (SNIA) has a Cloud Storage Technical Working Group (TWG) that works on storage-related problems related to implementation in a cloud. The TWG has developed an interface known as the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), which clients will use for control and configuration of the cloud. CDMI allows applications and data to be moved between different clouds.
TVAR Solutions is a technical value-added reseller that can help your organization design, deploy, and manage a flexible Storage Cloud infrastructure. Our senior technical advisors, experienced engineering resources, access to superior products, and proven performance ensures a fully functional, secure Storage Cloud.
Our methodology provides pre-sales architecture and support as well as post- sales deployment and verification. TVAR Solutions is committed to insuring continuity in the technology life cycle.
