Cloud storage

Cloud computing, are you in or out?

While the cloud is a new dimension of technology that IT managers and administrators will bake into the technology landscape, we have to make one fundamental decision: will the technology be in our out of our traditional data centers? This is a loaded question in regards to policy, security, compliance and a myriad of other categories that are very line-of-business specific.

One element than help give perspective for making this type of decision can be applied from basic management challenges. One important thing that I learned from working with various project managers is that in any engagement it is important to determine what you can manage and what you can (or cannot) control. When back-end components of the cloud reside outside of traditional internal data centers, we can manage the cloud — but not entirely control it. Part of this – identified in Lauren Horowitz’ post on this site – concerns the topics of transparency, service issues and cloud standards. When it comes down to it, if the back-end components of the cloud are outside the traditional data center, it cannot be fully controlled internally.

For offerings such as the Amazon EC2, Microsoft’s Azure, and Rackspace, these offerings are off site from internal data centers. With this parameter, decisions have to be made about what lies inside and outside traditional data centers. The alternative to the cloud back end being external, however, may not be as attractive and the time to market compared to a provided solution is inferior.

Building a cloud internally may be a daunting task for some organizations, especially when some of the more primary components may not already be in place. One mechanism that can truly enable an internal cloud is a virtualized server environment. In quantifying the virtual environment, it is not necessarily how many virtual machines or hosts are in use but the percentage of systems that are virtual machines. Along with that, another building block of a cloud is a storage grid for ultimate flexibility on data protection. Lastly, network capabilities are a pillar that defines the internal cloud. This can include the use of load-balancing and traffic-managing switches. With all of that, it becomes pretty clear that the costs and growing pains could be significant.

Make no mistake, there will be cloud computing success stories. But in the case of your own implementation — determining where the back-end cloud components reside will be a critical question that will need answering sooner than later.

EMC takes wraps off Atmos cloud plans

EMC Corp. says that it has a handful of Web 2.0 service providers using its new Atmos cloud-optimized storage (COS) product, but none that were ready to discuss it today. So for now, Atmos is an interesting technology announcement waiting for a reality check from customers.

And while EMC is focused on selling this to service providers initially, it does believe there’s an enterprise play down the line for media and entertainment, life sciences, and oil and gas companies interested in building private clouds. Somewhat confusingly, EMC also hinted at its plans eventually to become a service provider itself, which may cause some channel tension, but for now Atmos is a product only.

Here’s a taste of what EMC claims it will do. Atmos is a globally distributed file system (code-named Maui) that runs on purpose-built EMC hardware (code-named Hulk).

The software automatically distributes data, placing it on nodes across a network according to user-defined policies. These policies dictate what level of replication, versioning, compression, deduplication and disk drive spin-down a particular piece of data should have as it resides in the cloud. Depending on how important the information is, there might one, five, or 10 copies of it around the world, for example.

The closest thing out there today that resembles Atmos is Cleversafe.org.

Atmos also provides Web service application programming interfaces, including Represntational State Transfer and Simple Object Access Protocol, as well as the Common Internet File System and Network File System support for integration with file services; a unified name space, browser-based admin tools and multitenant support for multiple applications to be served from the same infrastructure without co-mingling data. And Simple Network Management Protocol support provides a plugin to existing reporting tools on top of the existing reports and alerts Atmos offers, according to EMC.

The software ships on purpose-built hardware available in 120TB, 240TB or 360TB configurations. [Editor's note: The National Center for Atmospheric Research has an archive already several petabytes in size. It would need at least three of these boxes to contain just its existing data. In other words 360 TB is large, but not that large by today’s standards].

There’s also a fit with VMware as Atmos can run on a VMware image, although Mike Feinberg, the senior VP of the cloud infrastructure group at EMC, says users don’t need VMware to use Atmos.

EMC did not announce pricing details today either, except to say that it’ll be competitive will existing petabyte-scale JBOD-type offerings.

Rackable Systems CloudRack designed for cloud computing

Fremont, Calif.-based Rackable Systems, Inc. is catering to cloud computing environments with a new server rack designed specifically for cloud environments called Systems CloudRack, the company announced October 30.

This new product from Rackable is one of many that we are seeing from vendors who are trying to design new equipment or re-purpose existing equipment for cloud computing environments, which are characterized by a large number of server nodes in scalable data centers providing SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) to users.

According to Saeed Atashie, director of server products at Rackable, CloudRack was created with the density and power efficiency cloud environments demand.

CloudRack is 44U cabinet that supports up to 88 servers, 176 processors from either AMD or Intel, 704 cores, 352 TBs of storage and up to 8x 3.5” drives/board (4 drives/CPU). It is designed to be power efficient, and easy to service, according to Rackable.
“CloudRack is designed from the ground-up with cloud customers needs and buying behavior in mind,” Atashie said. “In comparison, a number of our competitors design for a general purpose (one size fits all) server market and then try to position these products in the cloud computing market.”

Rackable also announced servers for HPC and cloud environments back in June, the  XE2208, with twice the density of existing Rackable Systems servers.  Rackable is focusing products on the cloud computing market because it is “the latest industry mega-trend,” Atashie said. Other companies focusing products on the cloud include IBM, VMware, HP and Intel.

Atashie said Rackable already has customers lined up for the CloudRack, but would not disclose any names. In general, CloudRack will appeal to companies using cloud computing or those using high performance computing, the company reported.

The Rackable Systems CloudRack CR1000 model can be built to order. More information about specific configurations, pricing or Rackable Systems’ build-to-order model is available on Rackable Systems’ website.

Cloud storage: What a difference a decade makes

When it comes to all the varieties of cloud services out there, cloud storage gets a lot of love from hosting providers such as RackSpace and the Planet, which have both made cloud-related storage moves of late.

But the skeptic in me wonders why hosting providers think that cloud storage will succeed when storage service providers (SSPs) of the late 1990s were such a blatant failure? I’m talking about companies like the dearly departed StorageNetworks, which rose to IPO stardom in 2000, only to shutter its doors two years later.

For one thing, said Rob Walters, the Planet’s general manager for data protection and storage, there’s a big difference between the storage used by SSPs of yore and today’s cloud providers. “The old SSPs used hardware like the EMC Symmetrix, the economics of which just didn’t work out,” he said. Cloud storage providers, on the other hand, rely heavily on taking commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and replicating it ad nauseum to get decent reliability and performance.

To that end, the Planet struck a deal last month with Nirvanix, a cloud storage provider that has written its own distributed “Storage Delivery Network” (SDN) and cloud-based virtual storage gateway, Nirvanix CloudNAS that runs on commodity Dell hardware. As part of the deal, The Planet customers can tap in to Nirvanix storage resources, and The Planet will act as one of the replicated nodes in Nirvanix’s geographically distributed SDN.

People are also looking to store data today that has different performance needs than what SSPs proposed to house, said Urvish Vashi, general manager for The Planet’s Dedicated Hosting, namely backup and archive data, plus Web 2.0 data like photographs and streaming video files. With these data types, “I/O to the disk isn’t the limiting factor, it’s I/O to the network.” In other words, for these files, it doesn’t matter if you store this data on a dog of a slow drive because access to it is limited by an even slower network.

And then, there’s the fact that things are just different now. Whereas 10 years ago public dialogue centered on security and privacy, people nowadays publish and expose every detail of their lives on blogs or sites like MySpace and FaceBook. Taking that idea one step further, the idea of hosting data on shared infrastructure just doesn’t phase companies the way it used to, Vashi said. “It’s less of an unusual choice than it used to be.”

I’m still skeptical, but willing to suspend disbelief.