Trend

Cloud storage

Service providers are moving to a cloud storage model as it offers greater scalability and opens up new revenue streams writes Akhtar Pasha

Every new technology has its pluses and minuses and cloud storage is no exception. We have recently witnessed cloud storage offerings in the news for all the wrong reasons in the cases of consumer oriented offerings such as Yahoo’s Briefcase, HP’s Upline and AOL’s Xdrive owning to various reasons such as experiencing 8+ hour outages, data being unavailable, mailboxes growing faster than cloud storage services and so on. Despite this, there is a strong story to be told regarding cloud storage from a Service Providers’ (SPs) perspective.

Cloud storage is a force that large enterprises need to quickly come to terms with. While the economic motivation for the cloud is high, the business need for speed and agility is greater than ever before, and the technology has reached a level at which prudent investments in cloud services can be made quickly and easily by interested companies.

Additionally there have been some success stories. We have Tata Communication Ltd that is already using cloud storage technology from NetApp and has announced its first public cloud offering, where large enterprises can buy storage and servers on the fly. It has already announced a SaaS application that’s available through the cloud for large enterprises. Then we have MindTree, which is also gearing up to include cloud storage in its portfolio of services and is working with application vendors to cloud enable their products.

Cloud storage is defined as storage which resides on public or private infrastructure that is external to the primary storage infrastructure, and is often shared to some extent in a chargeback model. According to Forrester, cloud storage is different from cloud computing, where a whole application lives fully or partially in the cloud.

We believe that cloud storage technologies would be actively pushed by SPs and large SIs rather than enterprises or medium businesses. Enterprises are still watching from the fence on where they can add value and evaluating what is the best way to take things forward, that is, should they go in for a private, public or a hybrid cloud model?

There are many business and technology drivers prompting SPs to go in for cloud storage. Among them are new revenue streams that depend upon the adoption of cloud storage; adoption depends upon acceptance; acceptance depends upon proven results; proven results depend upon delivered solutions; solutions depend upon integration and integrated proven solutions will earn them revenues.

Creating business value through cloud storage

Alok Bardiya, Vice President-Managed Services & Marketing, Tata Communications Ltd (TCL), said, “Globally, all enterprise-class SPs have moved into an infrastructure play and are delivering infrastructure such as applications, servers and networking remotely through the RIM model and cloud storage is a natural progression to this technology trend. Three things have to come together for the delivery of cloud services—infrastructure-as-as-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-services (SaaS) and all these pieces are available today and hence we have an early mover advantage in cloud storage.”

TCL is soon going to announce its first public cloud storage service and gave us a heads up on what’s in store for users. Bardiya said, “We are planning to rollout our first public cloud offering in Q1 2010 where enterprises can buy entire compute resources—networked storage and backup services and compute resources such as servers—on the fly in a flexible pay-by-use model [customers can purchase by hours/days/weeks].”

Miklos Sandorfi, Chief Strategy Officer, File and Content Services, Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, said, “There is a paradigm shift in the storage market from DAS to networked storage to cloud/virtualized storage. The latter consolidates and virtualizes disks and controllers to scale capacity and performance, to provide enhanced resilience, while reducing both CAPEX and OPEX for SPs. Enterprises can scale-up or scale down depending upon the requirement. It would be useful for SPs and development houses, who need compute resources—servers and storage—for testing their applications.” Deutsche Bank is using the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) to deliver private cloud storage to its business units.

According to Sandorfi the current cloud methodologies are not in tune with the heterogeneous realities that many organizations face today, creating the same poorly utilized data silos that organizations tried to avoid through their cloud computing efforts. He advises companies to adopt cloud storage at their own pace.

The business case

Cloud storage brings fresh revenue streams, newer and smaller customer accounts and creates business value for large enterprise customers as well. Since most SPs have already been providing co-location services for many years, have built robust systems and put processes in place and have a multi-tenancy model, cloud storage becomes a natural progression to add value to customers. It allows SPs to further reduce the power and cooling costs of their data centers. According to Bardiya, “We are expecting new revenues streams from the uptake of cloud storage by large SIs who need compute resources—storage, servers, and networking—for application development and application testing through the public cloud.”

TCL is using its cloud infrastructure to deliver not just computing power, storage and security services but also SaaS solutions to its customers. One such solution is an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) that allows a customer to manage critical paper documents as electronic files in a single system. Documents are electronically organized, indexed, filed and stored and can be retrieved easily for quick reference. It is a powerful document archival system, which ensures the safety of documents, faster access to them and huge cost savings. There is an increasing push towards the digitization of documents and records (potentially in hundreds of millions) across industries in India and TCL expects a strong off take for cloud storage.

According to Ramachandran Narayanswamy, Vice President-Head Storage, MindTree, “Most SPs already have two of the four important elements of cloud storage in place—Infrastructure and Platform as-a-service [the other two being application and business-as-a-service] and as enterprise customers start demanding some applications as a service because of the financial meltdown acting on their IT budgets, large SP are looking at the next big thing in the industry to lower costs and expand their revenues. To address this opportunity we are seeing a trend where SPs have tied-up with storage vendors to address the cloud storage opportunity. The cloud is not a commodity, it is a service—a niche service to be precise—and the value that it brings is immense including increased storage efficiency through virtualization and reduced costs in a chargeback model.”

According to Narayanswamy, instead of scouting and planning for buying new servers every time a SP adds a new application, which takes 6-8 weeks to procure, companies are demanding faster application deployment combined with a reduction of their data center power and cooling costs. He expected that applications over the cloud would become more prevalent in the next 12-24 months.

MindTree as an SP already offers Remote Infrastructure Management and entering into cloud storage is a natural choice. Narayanswamy, said, “On the engineering side, we are working with five application vendors to cloud enable their products and helping them on how to move their products from the on-premise model to the cloud model. It’s a big opportunity for us.”

Darshan Joshi Vice President, Storage and Availability Engineering Group, Symantec viewed things differently. According to him, “Cloud storage or storage-as-a-service is still in a nascent stage and plagued with poor bandwidth and latency issues. Hence enterprise users need to take a top-down look at their existing storage infrastructure before taking up cloud storage.”

Key elements of cloud storage

There are several elements to cloud storage such as storage virtualization, backup/archival of non-cloud applications, file storage and associated services. Many firms need advanced BC/DR capabilities (regulatory, risk mitigation, business partner requirements, etc.) but don’t have the real estate or the expertise to build it themselves.

Bardiya sees three key elements in cloud storage—storage virtualization, automation tools, and the chargeback model. Large enterprises can create private clouds within departments and allocate IT resources through the cloud storage model. This would bring down the cost of acquisition and the need to set-up fresh infrastructure as well as speed up application testing time for application vendors and software development houses.

Surajit Sen, Director-Marketing & Alliances, NetApp, said, “There are many components that need to work together to deliver cloud storage. The virtualized components here are compute, storage or network. Then you need secure and authorized access (certification, encryption and key management) and lastly a service delivery infrastructure that can support metering, monitoring & billing, ability to measure use of resources, remote monitoring & management and chargeback or billing for commercial grids and standards.”

Sen continued, “SPs had built IT infrastructure in silos over the years and have added new applications and supporting IT infrastructure [to sustain for a period of 3-4 years] and in the process have built excess capacity in scale-out mode, which is inefficient, complex to maintain and attracts huge cost to manage and run it. However, the current economic downturn and cash crunch are accelerating the adoption of cloud storage technologies by SPs as well as verticals such as retail, manufacturing and telecom. They are looking at new technologies to reduce CAPEX and OPEX spending in storage services.” As a result, the makeup of the data center is drastically changing as companies choose to take advantage of applications, infrastructure, and platforms delivered in the form of services.

Technological options

Some large SPs are already using NetApp’s Data ONTAP platforms as the foundation for a wide range of their internal and external cloud deployments. Data ONTAP 8 helps enterprise SPs move data and dynamically grow through a scale-out architecture. It supports secure multi-tenancy and offers a non-disruptive data migration path with automation tools to increase storage efficiency. It also features NetApp’s Data Motion and Performance Acceleration Module II (PAM). Sen said, “Data Motion technology allows a SP to move data non-disruptively across storage systems with zero application downtime. Now customers can eliminate the impact of planned maintenance outages in virtualized multi-tenant environments, which can be used to build internal and external clouds.” Second generation PAM, a flash technology-based caching module, provides an innovative, alternative use of flash/SSD technology rather than using SSDs in disk shelves—further reducing storage costs and increasing efficiency.

FileStore, based on the Veritas Cluster File System, is the file-based storage architecture [appliance] for Symantec’s own cloud services, which boasts of over 40 petabytes of online storage. It can boost storage utilization and eliminate planned downtime, and it supports the NFS, CIFS, FTP and HTTP protocols. The product integrates natively with Symantec offerings such as NetBackup and Endpoint Protection, which run directly on FileStore nodes to boost performance. A single FileStore system scales up to 16 nodes and 2 PB of storage. Joshi said, “Customers can build private or public cloud using FileStore. The FileStore cluster runs on a customer’s own Intel server hardware, taking SAN or JBOD storage and presenting it to Windows or UNIX NAS clients.”

HDS is offering Agile Cloud as its strategy based on Hitachi Content Platform version 3.0 (formerly Hitachi Content Archive Platform) as its cloud storage offering. Sandorfi explained, “SPs can use it to rapidly provision or de-provision a service, a consumption model where you pay for what you use with the agility to scale-up or scale-down the service without pre-planning.” HCP supports multi-tenancy with multiple namespaces. You can easily provision a service to multiple customers for public clouds or multiple business units for private clouds with secure data partitioning. It allows shared administration rights—SPs deliver a tenancy and the end-user self-administers one or more namespaces within the tenancy. Consumption of resource can be restricted to a maximum per tenant, allowing for either a warning when the threshold is breached (soft quota) or disabling write privileges (hard quotas). All these are available in a chargeback pay-per-use model for easy billing.

akhtar.pasha@expressindia.com