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Will 2012 be the year of the private cloud?

Nicos Vekiarides — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 02:30:44 +0000

As business adoption of cloud computing and cloud storage takes hold, new benefits of cloud IT versus traditional IT continue to emerge on a regular basis. One recent example is the Carbon Disclosure Project Study 2011: Cloud Computing – The IT Solution for the 21st Century produced by analyst firm Verdantix. In the report, not only are the cost advantages of cloud computing discussed but also the resulting reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, the study looks at a food and beverage company that is moving an HR application from local IT to the cloud. The model predicts a savings of $12 million over a 5 year period and a reduction of 30,000 tons in CO2 emissions, simply by moving to the public cloud.

So what does all this have to do with 2012 being the year of the private cloud? Let me explain. Interestingly enough, the study also concluded that this same company could save $5M and cut CO2 emissions by 25,000 tons over the same time period but this time by moving to a private cloud. While most of us already assume that public clouds are housed in highly efficient “green” data centers with tremendous economies of scale, the private cloud scenario modeled in this report makes a strong statement that improved resource utilization can drive huge benefits even when all infrastructure stays local. The study goes on to cite other efficiencies of cloud architectures including improved time-to-market which also apply to both public and private clouds.

Whether moving to public or private clouds, the bottom line is that businesses can realize substantial benefits from embracing cloud — in overall utilization, cost savings, emission savings, speed and agility. These are compelling benefits that may indeed persuade those who have resisted the move of their IT infrastructure outside of their four walls to deploy their own private clouds. With open source technologies like OpenStack gaining momentum, do we have the perfect storm for mass private cloud adoption in 2012?

While it’s certain that we will see an increase in private cloud adoption, reports like this may prompt many companies to consider incremental changes to their existing infrastructures to make them more efficient and “cloud-like.” That means we’ll likely see more hybrid deployments that leverage existing infrastructure, create more efficient multi-tenant environments, yet provide the ability to expand with public and/or private cloud deployments in the future.

In the data storage space, technologies such as CloudArray enable businesses to leverage existing infrastructure on the path to public cloud, private cloud or a combination of both. Enabling technologies are key for companies looking to leverage cloud efficiencies in incremental ways, particularly for those with an eye to keeping their options open in the future. And those options not only include public and private clouds but also a variety of cloud providers in each category.

So is 2012 the year of the private cloud? More likely, it will be the year of all clouds whether public, private or hybrid. Regardless of the cloud categories you select for use as components of your infrastructure strategy, consider adopting an enabling technology that not only improves your efficiencies today but also provides you with the most flexible path to the future.

Cloud Storage SLAs versus Architectural Visibility

Nicos Vekiarides — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 16:00:09 +0000

If you are using or thinking about using cloud storage, you are likely familiar with service level agreements (SLAs) from cloud providers that offer guarantees around the availability of your data and sometimes the durability of your data. The numbers associated with the guarantees are often expressed in 9’s. The table below illustrates how these availability numbers translate into expected yearly downtime. Note the considerable difference in downtime between 2, 3 and 4 9’s.

Availability	Annual Downtime
99%	3.65 days
99.9%	8.76 hours
99.99%	52.6 min
99.999%	5.26 min
99.9999%	31.5 sec

Beyond just the numbers, an important aspect of the cloud SLA is understanding how your business is compensated if the terms are not met. Typically, a provider who does not meet the SLA will reimburse a user for the unplanned downtime. This is often in the form of a refund of the service fee for the period of the outage. Some providers may offer to reimburse a multiple of that service fee (i.e. 2X, 3X, etc). That may appear confidence-inspiring, but how does it all add up for your business?

Let’s take a simple example: If your business applications use a Terabyte of cloud storage that costs $150/month, one full day outage is worth approximately $5 in provider fees. If the provider offered a 100% SLA that reimburses 3X downtime, that’s a $15 reimbursement.

Now what is the cost of a day-long outage to your business? Well, there’s possible revenue loss. Perhaps your business makes $2000/day in revenues that you can no longer realize. If two employees were unproductive the day of the outage, perhaps you lost $1000 or more in productivity. As you can see by now, $15 in compensation does not begin to address the $3000 loss your business has sustained. In practice, cloud SLAs may not address your cost of doing business, unless you happen to customize them specifically to do so – a highly unlikely negotiation for a public cloud service without dramatically impacting the pricing of the service.

Does this make cloud SLAs relatively worthless? Not really – SLAs can be a planning tool if they can be backed by empirical data. On the other hand, SLAs can be misleading if they are merely a thinly-veiled insurance policy that only covers provider costs. In her article SLAs Throttle Cloud Adoption, Pam Baker examines some of the pitfalls of cloud SLAs in more detail.

A more useful tool in planning may be architectural visibility into the cloud storage provider. Although SAS70 Type II and SSAE16 are good starting points for understanding the reliability of the physical data centers that house cloud storage, moving a level further down in visibility to data management policies can assist planning dramatically. For instance, how many copies of data are maintained and across how many data centers? What data protection practices are in place? Is there off-premise data protection? Are there snapshots of data you can roll back to in case of human error? All of these parameters are highly relevant when architecting a local storage solution. They are just as relevant when architecting a storage solution that extends to the cloud.

The fact is, many IT managers and administrators are very adept at building systems that conform to a set of best practices around data protection and disaster recovery. Architectural visibility allows administrators to build solutions that extend to the cloud but follow the same best practices used in high-availability on-premise deployments. For instance, if a cloud storage provider only offers a tier of disk storage with no additional data protection, that may call for a local copy of data on-premise. Perhaps if the storage is replicated across cloud sites, there is still a need for snapshots for continuous data protection (CDP) to avoid corruption of data due of human error, viruses, etc. Even with both replication and CDP policies at the cloud provider, there may still be a need for some last resort backup in case all else fails. Simply put, transparency and visibility provides knowledge that can build better and more robust storage configurations using the cloud. Moreover, it encourages ownership and accountability on the IT administrator’s part, which SLAs do not replace.

So while SLAs are helpful in conveying a cloud provider’s commitment to their offering, they are not a substitute for architectural visibility. As witnessed by some of the cloud outages earlier this year, using cloud is not a substitute for best practices. In the same vein, SLAs are no substitute for the visibility and the insight required to uphold best practices around system design, whether on-premise, in the cloud or hybrid.

What does cloud data look like?

jwbates — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 13:00:43 +0000

a storage sample:

We sometimes get the question: “What does my data look like when it’s stored in the cloud?” A complex answer would involve b-trees, log structures, cache algorithms, and tape encryption formats. A simpler answer is just to show a sample bucket:

http://twinstratahecgx14ylafyc5c01l9v7ovgyi8p6knflvb7×0f4.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/

For a lot of businesses, storing data in the cloud can be more than a little daunting. After all, the cloud is in the web, and the web is all about openness and sharing, right? Who really wants to share their data with the world?

If you take a look at the above data set, you’ll see why we’re confident enough to store our own corporate data using CloudArray. It’s mangled, mashed, and encrypted using well-tested standards and keys that stay in your hands. We’ve gone to great lengths to design a secure, reliable data representation that serves as the heart of the CloudArray technology.

Deploy Cloud Storage Before Your Users Do

Nicos Vekiarides — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 12:30:30 +0000

I glanced through an interesting read last week of a CIO who refused to address an IT issue for a business manager because the issue involved cloud services. What makes the story interesting is that the manager had decided to bypass IT by using public cloud services without authorization. While perception of this manager’s actions within his organization may range from heroic to questionable, it is fair to assume there was some justification why this user circumvented standard IT process.

In many instances, the justification of an act like this is straightforward: increased speed and reduced cost of IT deployments. What happens when a project surfaces that requires a few Terabytes of storage immediately and can’t wait a week for a provisioning request to be fulfilled or an expensive hardware PO to get approved? What happens when users are fed up with the speed of tape restores and instead take matters into their own hands and back up their data to the cloud — using their own security or none at all? Both cases represent situations most businesses would rather avoid, but with the prevalence of on-demand cloud-based IT, it is often nearly impossible for internal IT organizations to match the agility and flexibility enabled by the cloud that is readily available externally.

Preventing Cloud Chaos

How do we prevent potential “cloud chaos” in IT environments? One apparent solution would be tighter lockdowns to disallow users from accessing the cloud at all. A better solution would be to standardize on a set of practices for using the cloud that provides a supplement to in-house IT and is secure and compliant without putting an organization at risk.

In the case of storage, a good solution is to allow users to harness the elasticity and agility of cloud storage, through secure and standardized interfaces. While cloud storage is not always a replacement for on-premise storage, it can easily satisfy the need for rapid, incremental capacity expansion that sometimes cannot be fulfilled using internal IT resources. It can also address use cases that require bursts in storage capacity, such as test, development, business analytics or other tasks that run infrequently enough that they do not justify dedicated resources.

With cloud SAN and data protection products like CloudArray, you can easily create standardized policies around how cloud storage is consumed. These policies include encryption, preferred providers, availability and cost metrics. You can create thin-provisioned and secure data volumes, each up to 384TB, for immediate use by applications on a pay-as-you-go basis. Once these volumes are no longer needed, they can be deleted. Because these data volumes look and feel like a local SAN storage, they are also simple and familiar to manage. Internal IT and cloud storage can now co-exist seamlessly, giving users the best of all worlds.

Beware of the outlaws

Perhaps this is not last time you’ll hear about “cloud outlaws” bypassing internal IT. Whether you view this as a present threat, future concern or unlikely event, you can prevent this from happening by adopting cloud services in a standardized framework that IT can administer and manage; in the process, you can also substantially enhance the capabilities and agility of your IT department.

Does standardizing cloud storage make sense for your organization?

The Economics of Public Cloud Storage: The laws of mathematics still apply

admin — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:52:03 +0000

By Greg Roody

Once you cut through all the hype surrounding the benefits of Cloud Storage, specifically the economics of Public Cloud Storage, it becomes clear that there are use cases that do shine.

At the heart of the analysis are tried and true factors effecting storage costs like OPEX and CAPEX, deduplication, thin provisioning, compression, utilization, TCO, ROI, Business Opportunity costs (downtime, business recovery, business restart), etc.

Data Storage may be cheap and getting cheaper, but storing less data is always cheaper than storing more, and cutting costs – both operational and capital – is still critical.

The traditional Storage Model

There are several cost factors working against you in the traditional model:

You tend to over configure new storage arrays, “just in case”, buying slightly more capacity than needed. Nobody likes having to justify another capitol request because they planned poorly. Much of this capacity isn’t needed on day 1, you are buying capacity up to a year ahead of need
Once purchased, you will have to find room in the data center, provide power and cooling, and assign someone to administer it.
Next, you have to have some storage admin provision the volumes, assign them to the proper ports, zone them into the proper switches, and finally hand them over to the system admins.
Application environments consuming storage on the array tend to be over-provisioned, again because of planned growth. If that growth never arrives, you have stranded storage that will never be used and can’t be easily reclaimed

Then, after three years, you will have to buy a replacement and migrate all the data over to the new array. You will probably even repurchase and migrate that stranded storage as well.

But the economics of using Cloud Storage are very different.

With Public Cloud Storage, there is no capital expense to buy a new array (or a replacement array). Cloud Storage is rapidly expandable and you pay for only what you use. So after initial deployment, you would only have paid for the transfer cost of the initial storage and the monthly cost to host it. As you add additional data, you pay the additional fees, but only when you actually use it.

And since it’s deduplicated/compressed and thin provisioned, you can give your App Admin their full request of local storage, and you will only be paying for what they actually use. That’s why deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning, as well as snapshots, make so much sense to Cloud Storage deployments.

Of course, since it’s self-provisioned, the storage admin doesn’t need to make any bin file changes, or decide on spindle placement, or go through a complicated zoning assignment. All the administrator needs to do is pick the max size of the volume to be allocated, which Cloud provider tier to use, and which host it will be assigned to. There really aren’t any “storage administrator” skills required for this stage.

No local floor tiles or racks need to be freed up and assigned, no power needs to be run, and there are no HVAC implications. As an added benefit, you can configure it so there is both a local and a remote copy of the data, eliminating the infrastructure that would normally be required for site to site replication.

There are no storage upgrade costs.

There is no need to spend money custom coding to Cloud Storage API’s. Our CloudArray software can easily interface between your legacy server environment and Public Cloud Storage Providers.

You will have some additional costs for bandwidth between your data center and your Cloud service Provider, but bandwidth, like storage, is becoming a commodity and prices are dropping.

The net result is a considerable cost savings over deploying storage the traditional model.

Is it all a perfect world with Public Cloud Storage?

Of course not, there is always a tradeoff. In Enterprise data centers, the economics tip back to maintaining local and dedicated storage, here Private Storage Clouds still offer savings over traditional storage models but you will incur infrastructure expenses.

But in small to mid-sized businesses, the economics of using Cloud Storage (Public or Private) for second and third tier data storage is very compelling. Even in cases where you are storing backups in the Cloud, the advantages can rise to a 50% cost savings over traditional tape backup and offsite storage. I’ll go into more detail on that in future posts.

In the meantime, if you would like more information, feel free to contact us.

Storage Cloud-o-Nomics

Nicos Vekiarides — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:55:31 +0000

You may have read a recent blog entry by a leading industry analyst addressing cloud storage ROI: 20TB of public cloud storage as a service at Amazon’s S3 rate of $0.15/GB per month totals $3,000 per month, or a whopping $36,000 per year. Some do-it-yourselfers responded they can build 4 storage arrays for this one-year price. But can acquiring a glut of storage capacity give your business offsite data protection? Can it instill confidence that your business will be able to survive a complete loss of your primary site data?

We recently used Clarity AP to conduct a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis of cloud storage as an offsite replicated tier of storage accessible via our cloud gateway, CloudArray. For the analysis, we assume a company with a single site for data storage and linear capacity growth over 3 years. We calculated the 3 year TCO of an in-house implemented offsite tier of replicated storage versus replicated storage to the cloud. We plotted the capacity crossover point up to which cloud storage holds a cost advantage.

While we invite everyone to look at the full report, here’s a brief summary:

Cloud storage may make sense for capacities up to 60TB for replicated data. At these capacities, cloud storage benefits from a pay as you go model that does not suffer the underutilization experienced in storage arrays. As a remote site data protection solution, cloud storage substantially reduces the need for offsite infrastructure and management.

The chart below illustrates the crossover point:

3-yr TCO for offsite replicated storage

For the initial TB of capacity, costs for an in-house solution over a 3 year period are $233,492, compared to $79,794 for cloud storage. For 20 TB, there is a $100,000 savings when data is replicated to a cloud provider.

The report lists results, configurations and cost assumptions. The analysis purposely neglects to factor local site floor/power/cooling since some may argue these are sunk costs. It also does not address application/compute failover which is a separate analysis.

Conclusion

Based on the results of this analysis, cloud storage can be very compelling for companies replicating up to 60 TB to a public cloud. For a mid-sized company or departments within a larger organization, this represents a substantial capacity range across which cloud storage presents a strong ROI. Watch for this range to expand even higher over the course of the next 3 years with more favorable cloud pricing and tiers of service.

Can your business benefit from cloud storage? Let us know.