Storage For the Cloud

The massive movement to Cloud architectures puts new demands on systems vendors that most of them are unprepared to meet, while at the same time devaluing special features that many vendors used to differentiate their products. Nowhere has this trend been more evident than in storage.

For years, storage has had its own silo in the data center, SAN and/or NAS, with its own storage managers and administrators. They became dependent on various storage-centric features of the different vendors.

The Cloud has disrupted this comfortable island of automation.

The Cloud is all about reliable, low-cost self-service, with tremendous automation and integration. Service, capacity and performance need to be available on-demand, with no human intervention. Everything needs to be able to grow and shrink as application needs change, with a sharp eye to capacity utilization, since it’s easier than ever to switch Cloud vendors when one stumbles or is simply no longer competitive. The same observations are true of “private clouds.”

Virtualization is a key part of achieving Cloud goals, and virtualization changes the rules of the systems game. Functions that were traditionally part of storage are now performed as an integral part of operating systems and/or virtualization software, to make them more agile.

Many companies have observed that traditional, controller-centric, feature-rich SAN and NAS solutions are not appropriate for the Cloud environment. They are simply using inexpensive JBOD’s for storage and depending on massive replication by the file system to provide reliability, typically making a minimum of 3 whole copies of the data, before backups, in order to assure availability. If the alternative is an old-technology NAS or SAN, this is a smart idea, which is why its use is growing so quickly.

X-IO has a whole different approach to storage. It’s not NAS. It’s not SAN. It’s not cheap JBOD’s with a make-lots-of-copies filesystem. It’s an intelligent storage node that not only uses, but enhances the drives from one of the major OEM suppliers, Seagate. X-IO makes them better by a large margin, and it doesn’t do all the things that are no longer needed in the Cloud environment. X-IO gives you more of what you do need for Cloud, and none of what you don’t need.

The X-IO approach to storage assumes you’re smart about building your data center. You’ll take a building-block approach, with lots of well-configured servers, network and storage blocks, with a layer of software on top of it all to orchestrate it. You want each building block to be great at what it does – do a lot, cost a little, and play its role in the overall system.

In the end, storage comes down to a small set of storage components used by everyone. Rather than ignore the details of the drives and wrap them in fancy, useless (in the Cloud) packaging like everyone else, X-IO adds value, real value, to the drives themselves. This value persists as Seagate develops and releases new drives – the 2 to 5X X-IO advantage over every other storage solution will ride the waves of new drives into the future.

X-IO spent over 10 years of deep development of unique IP (the first 5 as a Seagate division). Over that time it invented and hardened algorithms and code and incorporated the experience from having thousands of units in the field over many years. The results are clear, and differentiate the X-IO storage brick approach from everyone else. Given a set of drives, X-IO will make them:

• Perform at least twice as fast, often 3-4X anyone else when near capacity
• Deliver at least twice the throughput
• Fail at less than 1% the rate of anyone else
• Not require replacement during their 5 year warranty
• Take much less space, often 30-50% less
• Require much less power, often 50% less
• Require less cooling

Finally, X-IO can incorporate SSD drives as required to achieve even better performance, though this is needed much less often than with other vendors.

In service operations, Cloud is measured on cost and SLA’s. X-IO storage is all about cost and SLA’s. X-IO is the winning choice of storage for Cloud.

Comments

[techniques]

I'm interested as well as interested in what you really are covering right here.

[Mark Simmons]

There does seem to be a massive demand for cloud based storage at the moment. I am a little worried that demand is making other things, such as security and scalability, behind sales.

My service provider seems to have issues almost weekly so we have been looking into alternatives.

I've never heard of X-IO, so may give it a go :)