Shifting Technology Habits and the Growth of Object Storage

Technology is, for many of us, a vital and inextricable part of our lives. We rely on technology to look up information, keep in touch with friends and family, monitor our health, entertain ourselves, and much more.

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However, technology wasn’t always so ubiquitous – it wasn’t too long ago that our wireless phones had limited features and even fewer users actually using these features. Here’s the breakdown from 2004, according to a study from the Yankee Group:

This means that just over 10 years ago, less than 50% of cell phones had internet access and less than 10% had cameras. Even with 50% of phones having internet access, only 15% of users took advantage of this feature.

pew research center

By contrast, look at this survey conducted by Pew Research in 2014:

Among the 18-29 age group, text messaging and internet are more frequently used features than phone calls, which is indicative of the tremendous shift in technology use over the past few years. This study doesn’t even cover a major feature that many users use their phones for: pictures. As younger users turn almost exclusively to smartphone cameras for their photos (and, of course, #selfies), they turn to photo-sharing sites to host and display their images.

Photos are just one type of the ever-growing deluge of unstructured data, though. For enterprises, unstructured data also includes emails, documents, videos, audio files, and more. In order for companies to cost-effectively store this data (while keeping it protected and backed up for end-users), many of them are starting to turn to object storage over traditional network-attached storage (NAS).

Some of the benefits of object storage include a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and the ability to easily scale up as data needs grow. That by itself is not enough, though. With a solution like our very own HyperStore, in addition to the affordable price (as low as 1c per GB per month) and infinite scalability (from tens of terabytes to hundreds of petabytes), we offer easy management and access control, plus strong data protection with both erasure coding and replication settings. You can read about all of HyperStore’s features and benefits here.

Unstructured data use is only going to continue to grow. Smartphones and other data-intensive technologies will only become more prevalent, and you’ll want to be prepared to meet that growth. Learn more about Cloudian’s hardware and software solutions today.

Lenovo Solves Data Storage Needs with a New Appliance

As our lives become increasingly digital, we’ll generate more and more data. By current estimates, storage needs are doubling in size every two years. That means that by 2020, we will reach 44 zettabytes – or 44 trillion gigabytes – of data, with most of that growth as unstructured data for backups, archives, cloud storage, multimedia content, and file data. This growth in data is quickly outpacing IT budgets. It’s clear we need a new storage approach if we hope to keep up with this deluge of data.

Introducing a New Appliance by Lenovo and Cloudian

 

Lenovo, together with Cloudian, is attacking the $40B storage market with a new, innovative capacity storage appliance for low-cost, scalable storage which addresses 80% of customer’s data needs. We are proud to introduce the Lenovo DX8200C powered by Cloudian as the storage building block which can scale to this challenge and further drive datacenter efficiency and investment protection.

Lenovo DX8200C powered by CloudianThe Lenovo DX8200C powered by Cloudian is an affordable and scalable object storage solution.

Offered as part of Lenovo’s StorSelect software-defined storage program, this factory integrated appliance is built upon Lenovo’s industry-leading servers and features:

  • S3: S3 is the de facto cloud storage standard as stated by Gartner. Cloudian is the only native S3-compatible mass capacity storage solution on the market, enabling customers and partners to take advantage of the $38B AWS ecosystem
  • Affordability: Lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) to $0.1 per GB per month
  • Scalability: The flexible design allows you to start small and scale up to 112 TB of storage capacity per node
  • Security: Utilize always-on erasure coding and replication to ensure your data is protected
  • Simplicity: Single SKU for full appliance and support

The Lenovo DX8200C powered by Cloudian delivers a fully-integrated and ready-to-deploy capacity storage system, reducing risks and variables in the datacenter. Global support is provided by Lenovo’s top-rated support team.

Additionally, what sets this appliance apart from others is the use of Cloudian’s HyperStore storage platform, bringing with it a full host of key features, including:

 

In a news announcement today, David Lincoln, GM of the Data Center Group at Lenovo, stated that “the Cloudian HyperStore solution enables us to deliver leading innovative, software-defined storage capabilities to enterprises and service providers worldwide.”

Michael Tso, CEO and co-founder of Cloudian, reiterated this point by stating that “enterprises and value-added resellers (VARs) can maximize their business investment and revenue opportunities with this fully turnkey, channel-ready, 100 percent S3 object storage solution.”

With more and more industries requiring massive amounts of data to be stored, this partnership with Lenovo represents a vital next step – one where pre-loaded appliances make it easy for companies to both integrate with existing infrastructure and scale out for large deployments.

The Lenovo DX8200C powered by Cloudian will be available worldwide in the third quarter of 2016 but Lenovo and Cloudian are working closely together to address all customer needs in the meantime.

Start Small and Grow with Unlimited Scale

It seems that much of the current conversation around data revolves around how much of it there is and how much there will be in the coming years. While this macro level perspective is important and should help inform how data is stored, it’s also important to focus in on the micro level use cases.

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Many companies tout that they can start big and go bigger. The issue with this approach is that it ignores a large swath of customer needs. What if you don’t need hundreds of TBs of storage immediately? What if you want to start small, but anticipate growth down the line?

Cloudian HyperStore 6.0

Scale as you grow with Cloudian HyperStore

 

Cloudian offers the flexibility to start small without sacrificing any of the robust features in our HyperStore operating environment. We offer both software and hardware solutions so you can start with as little as tens of TB of storage and scale up to hundreds of PBs.

Cloudian HyperStore can be deployed on off-the-shelf commodity hardware for 1c per GB per month, making it both easy and affordable to scale out as your data grows. As you add more data, HyperStore will automatically divert from highly used disks to less used disks to avoid imbalance. Of course, as you scale, security and data resiliency become more and more vital, which is why this smart disk balancing is only one part of the wider array of protection features in HyperStore.

Big protection for all your data

 

No matter how much data you’re storing, we’ve built in some of the most robust security features possible to protect your data. On a read request on your data, all replicas are checked and missing or out-of-date replicas are automatically updated or replaced. As a result, you don’t have to worry about restoring to outdated data.

The Cloudian Management Console lets you monitor your system’s health and get alerts when things are off. Be proactive by utilizing replication or erasure coding (or both!) to properly protect your data. Plus, spread your data out among geographically independent data centers as an added contingency against data loss. If you need to conduct a more granular check-up on your system, we’ve implemented an “object GPS” so you can quickly and easily locate any specific object within a given bucket.

As your organization grows, your access needs will change as well. HyperStore gives you multi-tenancy controls so that you can give role-based access to administrators and users.

From the very beginning, we believed strongly in providing customers with all the tools they needed to create the storage platform that works for them. In addition to the HyperStore software, we also have turnkey appliances that enable small deployments with the potential to scale up to many PBs.

Cloudian HyperStore Appliance 1500 The Cloudian HyperStore 1500 Appliance offers hot-swappable hardware, automated data tiering, and unlimited scale.

If you’d like to try Cloudian HyperStore for yourself, sign up for a free trial today.

Betting on Software-Defined Storage

Cloudian

Picking a company to advise is not always easy, but sometimes it just clicks – take, for example, my recent decision to join Cloudian’s advisory board. As outlined in my recent blog post, I look at several factors before deciding to advise a company:

  • The potential for growth
  • How well they know their target audience
  • The quality of the team
  • How passionate everyone is (not just the employees of the company, but also my own passion and excitement)

Of course, these are broad factors I always consider. When it came to Cloudian, I had plenty of other questions as well:

  • Does the product/service actually work?
  • Does it scale?
  • Does it save money?
  • Does it enable a more agile operations environment?

 

Everything I’ve heard from customers – and from the team, of course – indicates that the answer is a definite YES. But before I go into more detail on what Cloudian does, a bit of background on object storage.

Storage: Then and Now

 

Storage was long dominated by firms that did a good job protecting your data – and serving it up for the then dominant vertically scalable workloads – and that, in turn, locked you into their proprietary hardware and software, resulting in the largest margins in IT infrastructure. Back in 2008, many firms such as Intel and LSI and the whitebox server providers and entrepreneurs including myself thought: hmm, storage is taking more and more of the IT budget but is not keeping up with new application architectures, new patterns of data generation, and a new generation of storage managers. There has got to be a better way.

And that better way is now called software-defined storage.

Today, storage is much better than it was in 2008, with far better economics, business models that pass the benefits of flash and network improvements on to customers, and a shift towards scale-out, developer-friendly architectures. Much of this change has been forced by Amazon and S3, who set the bar quite high for easy-to-use, massively scalable, and comparatively less expensive storage.

How Cloudian Fits In

 

Cloudian provides on-premise software-defined storage at 1c/GB. This by itself does not set the company apart, but they made a smart move early on – they bet on Amazon’s S3 API. Instead of inventing another proprietary API in a sea of proprietary APIs, they decided to focus on S3 from day one. This gives them a unique offering – 100% S3-compliant storage that uses metadata in interesting and intelligent ways.

So if you and your developers and the software you are running can interact with S3 – it can interact with Cloudian. Cloudian’s management interfaces blow away the AWS storage GUI, incidentally – giving you a firm-wide view into your data, grouped into blobs, and the policies you’ve applied to these blobs. So your developers are happy because it scales and it is basically S3 out the front and your storage teams are happy because they retain the control and visibility they need to do their jobs. And that’s not to mention “native” multi-tenancy, which is one of many reasons service providers like NTT rely on Cloudian.

The results have been outstanding, with customers providing excellent reviews – and this growing word of mouth has led to a sales acceleration.

I went into the Cloudian offices recently to talk a bit more about my reasons for joining the advisory board, and you can watch the video here:

I’m excited to get a front-row seat as Cloudian continues to ramp up their momentum and grow, and I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone in this wonderful team of people.

Hypervisor Agnostic Cloud Storage for VDI Home Directories

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is, simply put, the process of running virtualized desktops for users within an organization using server-based computing. You have the option of running persistent or non-persistent virtual desktops.

If you are interested in knowing more about these types of deployments, you can find out more by using your favorite search engine. If you are like me and you just want to click on a link and have the information pop up on your screen, here is a blog post that explains VDI in more detail.

For example, a VDI deployment with Hyper-V can be explained with the diagram below. The RDP client logs in to the web browser server, then the RD Connection Broker server lists and orchestrates the virtual machines. The AD server authenticates access. The RD Session Host server redirects the RDP client to the right virtual machine and the RD Gateway server publishes and makes the VM available to the authorized user.

VDI deployment with Hyper-VVDI deployment with Hyper-V

Whether you are running persistent and/or non-persistent virtual desktop solutions, your organization will still require storage for your virtual desktop user home directories, etc. You can deploy additional LUN storage. However, with traditional LUN storage, you are likely to run through the following process:

    1. You, as the VDI administrator, will define the storage requirement for each user.
    2. You’ll submit the storage requirement request to your storage administrator.
    3. The storage administrator creates the LUN storage base on your requirements.
    4. You create your master image/golden image for your virtual desktops.
    5. You’ll provision the virtual desktops to your user when you are ready.
    6. You’ll run into late night support calls when your user runs out of disk space to store their files/presentations/media in their user home directories.
    7. You make a call to your storage administrator to provision more storage @ 1am in the morning.
    8. You and your storage administrator work through the wee hours on the support calls.
    9. Repeat steps 6 through step 8…monthly, weekly, or even daily!

 

A Better Solution for VDI Users with Cloud Storage

 

 

Did the previous process flow sound familiar? What if you and your storage administrator could host your own hypervisor agnostic on-premise cloud storage solution within your own firewalls for your virtual desktop users’ home directories? What if you, as the storage administrator, can easily increase the bucket capacity for each user when a support call comes in with a few clicks? All of this is possible because software-defined cloud storage solutions such as Cloudian are designed from the ground up to be:

    • Simple
    • Highly scalable
    • Always-on with secure and encrypted access

 

VDI deployment with cloud storageHyper-V VDI deployment with cloud storage for VDI users’ home directories

Instead of fielding late-night support calls, easily provision S3 buckets for each virtual desktop user and provide secure S3 portal access without missing a beat. With some on-premise cloud storage solutions, you can:

    • Use the inherent multi-tenancy feature to create and deploy storage for all VDI user home directories.
    • Use QoS to throttle each user’s PUTs and GETs.
    • Monitor per user usage and easily review reports for chargeback purposes.
    • Use replication or erasure coding on a per storage policy to ensure each group has the right data protection benefits.

 

To see how easily a virtual desktop user can use a secure cloud storage system as a home directory, watch the following video:

A Virtual Desktop user using Cloudian HyperStore Cloud Storage as his home directoryPer bucket and per user granularity is possible. It is because some cloud storage solutions are fully Amazon S3 compliant. Think about it – rather than creating additional LUN storage for your VDI users’ home directory requirements, I can simply create a master image that has the secure on-premise cloud portal for every group and every virtual desktop user defined in the web browser of the desktop master/golden image.

From that one golden image, I can deploy hundreds or thousands of virtual desktops that have a secure on-premise cloud storage solution for all my virtual desktop users. My virtual desktop users can easily access and use my deployed cloud storage as their home directories from any web browser. Best of all, many cloud storage solutions also support NFS/SMB/FTP via its native file access integration. This means you get the benefit of industry standard file protocols access without any third-party gateways!

With cloud storage solutions for user home directories and for file sharing purposes, we get the following benefits for virtual desktop deployments:

    • Simplified virtual desktop deployment with a hypervisor agnostic cloud storage solution. Minimize your late night “virtual desktop user is out of storage” support calls.
    • Scale-out and highly available home directories for virtual desktop user storage. Each storage bucket capacity is tunable for each virtual desktop user. There is no single point of failure with cloud storage.
    • Secure in-flight data and data-at-rest with AES-256 encryption.
    • Simplified and flexible data protection. Virtual desktop users can manage their own data protection and retention requirements.
    • Predictive analytics for storage planning. Use built-in analytics to manage your storage growth requirements.
    • Fully S3 compliant storage. This means you can support hundreds of S3 compatible applications using your very own on-premise cloud storage solution.
    • Software-defined. Use any x86 commodity server to deploy your own hybrid, private, and public cloud storage solution and minimize your operating cost.
    • Manage access and performance with QoS throttle. Easily manage user PUTs and GETs by using QoS throttles at the group or user level.

 

With the availability of secure cloud storage solutions for on-premise deployments, it’s a no-brainer to look into simplifying our lives so that we can get away from the repetitive user storage support calls in the middle of the night. Say goodbye to conversations such as:


“Help! I can’t save my executive briefing presentation and videos on my desktop. I need to securely share the presentation and videos with our Tokyo office. I am getting an error on my desktop pointing out that my e:\ drive and my user home directory is full. And NO, I cannot delete any of the existing files to make space for these new files and videos because I need all of it to be always accessible to me.”

To find out more about the advantages of cloud storage solutions, visit Cloudian.

Cheers,

Dominic

Reinventing Storage Administration at Scale with Cloudian HyperStore 6.0

Learn More About Cloudian HyperStore– Download White Paper

At Cloudian, we are continuously enhancing and evolving our flagship product HyperStore, a fully S3-compatible object storage technology. But even with all our rich history of innovative releases, I’m most proud of the upcoming Cloudian HyperStore 6.0 – we have risen to a new challenge…@scale operations. How do we help IT administrators manage Petabytes of storage and still have time for a cup of tea?

As data volumes start to outpace operating budgets and the headcount needed to manage them, today’s enterprises are turning to full-featured, low-cost software defined storage technologies with almost limitless scalability and accessibility. While the software can be deployed on low-cost commodity hardware, thereby reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO), the cost of managing storage infrastructures – managing operations, performance, protecting data and tuning workflows and processes – has remained fixed.

A 2016 Gartner report found that the TCO for a terabyte of traditional on-premises storage was $2009 per terabyte, with 62 percent of the costs resulting from hardware and software acquisition ($1245). The operational costs associated with this terabyte of storage were 26 percent of the total, or $511, with “other” costs adding up to 12 percent ($253).

With software-defined storage like Cloudian HyperStore, the TCO for a terabyte of storage now drops to $866 per year, and with costs as low as one cent per gigabyte per month, hardware and software acquisition are reduced to just 14 percent of the total costs, or $122.

Unfortunately, as reported by Gartner, the cost of operations for this model remains fixed at $511, which now represents 58 percent of total yearly storage costs, significantly outweighing hardware and software expense. It’s clear that to further drive costs from cloud storage, organizations will need to find ways to reduce management burden and operational costs.

Cloudian HyperStore 6.0 is designed to help operate and manage at scale. The new release simplifies and automates the operational management of cloud storage by creating new system management features, which scale to meet the requirements of multi-petabyte, multi-region storage deployments. It lowers the management costs and reduces administrative burden. HyperStore 6.0 advances the vision Cloudian has shared for Smart Data Storage by delivering fully integrated smart data operations within the platform for seamless and extremely cost-efficient management.

The basis for many of 6.0’s key features came from our customers. They shared their “wish list” of management tools and functionality that could streamline or eliminate the manual tasks that normally weigh down the storage admin in 100+ node deployments.

Introducing Storage Operations and Management @Scale

 

Cloudian HyperStore 6.0 provides new tools, user interfaces and automated features to scale management and operational efficiency across complex cloud storage infrastructures, lowering storage management costs for enterprises and streamlining operational tasks for storage administrators. The new 6.0 release can reduce operations management as nodes are added, helping lower the overall operational costs to businesses as data volumes continue to grow. HyperStore 6.0 also provides greater data durability with more continuous automated failure resolution, and delivers robust system tuning tools for proactive and low-cost management of system health and operational efficiency for data storage at petabyte scale.

Operations @scale. In Cloudian HyperStore 6.0, an entirely new operations console provides an instant 360-degree view into storage system performance, with an enhanced GUI that greatly increases the visibility of key data. The new operations console enables storage admins to view and manage hundred of nodes across multiple data centers and cloud environments in a single screen, while automating such operations as adding and removing nodes with the simple configuration of an IP address. And the user interface isn’t just to look at: Users can click on the data representations to drill down and access detailed information and take action directly from the interface screen. 6.0 also automates non-disruptive, node-by-node rolling technical patches and upgrades that are delivered via touchless distribution and management systems, saving time and resources for storage admins.

Cloudian HyperStore operations console HyperStore’s newly renovated operations console provides a 360-degree, drillable view of the health of your system

Durability @scale. HyperStore 6.0 also extends data durability with automated features that constantly evaluate data integrity – even data at rest – to ensure that storage within the system is always repaired and data is always verified. When the system identifies data failures, it proactively repairs and rebuilds them. The Cloudian HyperStore 6.0 system proactively monitors and scans workflows for I/O or disk failure, which Smart Redirect features can track and map to help trigger automatic repairs. The new release enables both local cache replication for data protection and Amazon S3 cross-region replication – one of Cloudian’s many rich S3 compatible features – for regulatory compliance and disaster recovery.

Cluster rebalance and data rebuild information The storage admin can view cluster rebalance and data rebuild information from HyperStore’s robust analytics capabilities

Tuning @scale. Cloudian HyperStore 6.0 simplifies system tuning to optimize the infrastructure for the highest level of system health and data protection. Visual Storage Analytics automatically identifies “hot spots” and rebalances workflows for storage I/O protection. It also can locate object parts using new “Object GPS” functionality that track data distribution with high granularity across nodes, racks and data centers around the globe.

HyperStore 6.0 operations console The HyperStore 6.0 operations console allows the storage admin to view real-time capacity consumption and system performance

As before, Cloudian continues to keep pace with incorporating changes to the AWS S3 API into HyperStore. Cloudian is the leading object storage vendor with 100 percent S3 compatibility, and the only vendor to offer an S3 guarantee.

To learn more about how Cloudian HyperStore 6.0 can help your company simplify and automate the operational management of your hybrid storage infrastructures, contact Cloudian at www.cloudian.com.

Also watch this blog over the next few weeks as we add more detailed posts about the features of 6.0.

Stay tuned,

Paul

Harness the Power of Software-Defined Infrastructure to Help Solve the Biggest Big Data Storage Challenges

With the popularity of rich media, the proliferation of mobile devices and the digitization of content, there has been an exponential growth in the amount of unstructured data that IT is managing (think medical images or large research data sets).  And this growth is not slowing but increasing. This unprecedented growth is just not sustainable for IT organizations as they try to control costs and limit or reduce the operational complexity in the datacenter.  Enter the need for an evolution in IT – for Software-Defined Infrastructure, and software-defined storage solutions to help store and manage the Big Data tidal wave.

 

Intel and Cloudian understand the powerful benefits behind software-defined infrastructure, and the real value it delivers to businesses and to the IT organizations behind them. We have been working together to deliver the true benefits of SDI to our joint customers with the world’s largest Big Data storage needs. From enterprises in Life Sciences, Media & Entertainment, and Financial Services, to Service Providers like ScaleMatrix, who serve their customers with new, innovative hosted cloud storage solutions, we help them store and manage petabyte-scale data, easily, securely, and cost-effectively.

Cloudian develops 100-percent software-defined object storage software.  We’ve joined Intel’s Storage Builders alliance, an elite group of independent software vendors focused on delivering on the benefits of software-defined infrastructure with innovative software-defined storage solutions. We’re pleased to join the larger Intel’s Builders family of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), operating system vendors (OSVs), and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to support the group’ mission to accelerate global adoption of software-defined infrastructure, including cloud, storage, and networking technologies. We’ve contributed Cloudian’s validated software-defined object storage designs, along with Cloudian HyperStore – our scale-out, ready-to go, object storage software – to deliver customers all the benefits of software-defined storage: scalability, agility, and the choice to build on-premise or hybrid clouds at the lowest cost. We’ve qualified the Intel Xeon processor D-1500 product family for use with Cloudian HyperStore. We’ve also developed a comprehensive reference architecture for Cloudian HyperStore powered by Lenovo hardware.

Customers love the flexibility and scalability of software-defined storage. They can quickly deploy HyperStore for on-premise cloud storage that’s easy to manage but that also allows choice to automatically tier some or all of their data to any S3-compatible cloud in a hybrid model. Global enterprises use HyperStore to easily and securely manage their data stored across multiple datacenters, and Service Provider businesses take advantage of HyperStore’s software-defined architecture to deliver Storage as a Service (StaaS) product offerings to their customers. They are able to quickly deploy and manage these services while easily making updates to continuously deliver new features to their customers.

Together, Cloudian, Intel, and other leading vendors, including Lenovo, are helping organizations embrace the business value of software-defined infrastructure.  We put the power of software-defined object storage in the hands of our joint customers to make their IT organizations, and their infrastructures strong, agile, and ready to meet the demands of their Big Data.

Learn more about Cloudian and Intel Storage Builders.

What is Hybrid Cloud Storage and What Can it Do For You?

IT departments today are forced to come up with innovative ways to deal with the amount of unstructured data that they must manage. Now many of these places are looking to merge the flexibility and scale of the cloud with the security and control of their on-premises IT environment by using a hybrid cloud storage solution. However, until recently, the hybrid cloud storage solution was a mere dream.

CloudianHybridCloud

With the release of the Hyperstore 4.0, Cloudian has transcended this split data system and created a cost-effective data storage solution that begins in the on-premises IT environment, but also integrates with the Amazon cloud infrastructure.

Basic Benefits of Using Hybrid Cloud Storage

Moving towards a hybrid cloud storage system such as the newly developed Cloudian Hyperstore, companies are now able to reap a number of previously unattainable benefits including:

–          Reducing storage acquisition costs

–          Reducing cost of managing storage environment

–          Enjoying Amazon S3 compatible and complementary applications

–          Easily expanding from small (Terabytes) to Petabytes as unstructured data grows

–          Balancing SLAs (service level agreements) using S3 bucket lifecycle policies

 

Cloudian Hyperstore Infrastructure

 

Cloudian Hybrid Cloud

The Cloudian Hyperstore is a hybrid cloud storage software solution for service providers and enterprises. It is fully Amazon S3 compliant and can be seamlessly integrated. It begins with an on-premises data solution and integrates with a cloud data solution for the best of both worlds, particularly for those with large growing amounts of unstructured data.

Hybrid Cloud Storage with Cloudian Hyperstore and Amazon S3

 

– Simone Morellato Director of Technical & Solutions Marketing

Rethinking Enterprise Storage

rethinking_storage With soaring data growth occurring across all industries, IT planners need to rethink how they design and implement enterprise storage technology. Traditional NAS and SAN platforms have served as the bulwark of data center storage capacity for decades, however, storing information on these premium storage assets is becoming increasingly cost-prohibitive for many organizations. As a result, a new paradigm is needed to augment existing data center storage assets to more efficiently store and protect the vast amounts of information piling up across enterprise environments.

Read full article by Storage Switzerland …

Choose Wisely

S3 Compatibility (1)Applications are driving the escalating need for cloud storage and the public cloud providers saw it coming years ago. Amazon’s foresight dates back to early 2006 when they launched the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), a massively scalable and cost effective cloud storage solution developed specifically to house the massive influx of data being created by organizations worldwide. We have since witnessed several milestones for the public cloud giant including the number of objects stored in S3 grow to over 2 trillion, 40 price drops on the service, and the development of a burgeoning ecosystem of over 350+ compatible applications. It’s clear that Amazon has established itself as the dominant leader in public cloud storage. Now hybrid cloud storage is getting its turn in the limelight. For the enterprise, flexibility, control, and resilience are at the forefront of their concerns and hybrid cloud is rapidly shaping up to be the solution of choice for their storage needs. In fact, a recent Rackspace survey indicated that over 60% of the enterprise IT departments surveyed planned to deploy hybrid cloud over the next 3 years.

Amazon S3 holds twice the market share of all its closest competitors combined, so it’s likely that the storage platform of choice for on-premise hybrid or private cloud deployments largely depends on its compatibility with S3. With no standards enforced for claiming S3 compatibility, choosing the right storage platform can be tenuous.

So what does it mean to be S3 compatible? And why does it matter?

Why it matters…

If you have applications that speak to S3 and you are looking to deploy a hybrid cloud storage solution that allows for applications to simply switch between storage targets, then compatibility matters. If you utilize any of the 350+ applications that speak S3 and you want them to operate seamlessly in an on-premise or hybrid cloud environment, compatibility matters. If you have written or plan to write applications that utilize S3 and want them to continue to run without having to rewrite their APIs, then compatibility matters. If ease of migration, cost efficiency, and TCO are important to you, then compatibility matters.

Compatibility with the S3 API can mean the difference between a good decision and costly and time intensive mistake. Understanding the S3 API and the varying levels of compatibility storage platforms offer can seriously impact the outcome for those of you that plan to stand up hybrid or on-premise clouds.

The S3 API

To make S3 simple for applications to access, Amazon built and continues to refine the operations available to applications through the S3 API. The API enables operations to be performed on the S3 Service, S3 Buckets, and S3 Objects. There are 51 total operations available through it. Compatibility is based on a storage platform’s ability to perform some, many, or all of the 51 operations available through S3 API.

Simple Compatibility

There are 9 simple operations available through the S3 API. The “Simple” subset of operations should act as the barebones set of operations that a storage platform must perform in order to claim compatibility. These 9 operations allow for very basic manipulation of data through the API, though it is important to remember that 42 additional operations still remain that are not being executed by a storage platform falling under this category, even though it may boast “S3 compatibility”. The chart below shows the 9 “Simple” operations:

Screen Shot 2014-04-24 at 2.57.08 PM

An example of a storage platform that can claim simple compatibility is SwiftStack. Using middleware called Swift3, SwiftStack can perform the above operations through the S3 API.

Moderate Compatibility

If an application requires just one more operation to be performed through the S3 API other than the 9 “Simple” operations listed above AND you don’t want to have to rewrite your application APIs, then you need to look to storage platforms that carry a bit more robust compatibility. The chart below shows the 9 simple operations (in red) with the addition of 18 moderately complex operations (in yellow). In order to be considered moderately compatible, a storage platform should be able to perform the majority of the 27 operations listed below:

Screen Shot 2014-04-24 at 2.57.21 PM

 

One such storage platform is the open-source unified storage platform, Ceph. Based on the above chart, it can boast “Moderate” S3 compatibility, though robust as it is, even it cannot perform 100% of the operations listed above.

Advanced Compatibility

For those of you that desire peace of mind, knowing that the applications you have written that speak S3 and/or all 350+ S3 compatible applications will continue to work seamlessly with your hybrid or on-premise cloud, then choosing a storage platform that boasts advanced compatibility with the S3 API is vital. Of the 51 operations available through the S3 API, 24 of them are considered advanced. Below is the total set of operations available through the API including simple (red), moderate (yellow), and advanced (green):

Cloudian is the only storage platform that can boast full “Advanced Compatibility”. Additionally, Cloudian is the only storage platform in the “Advanced Compatibility” tier that allows developers continued use of Amazon’s S3 SDK, which significantly eases their workload. Finally, Cloudian is the only storage platform that automatically tiers data between on-premise deployments and Amazon’s S3 public cloud while representing it under a single name space. With this set of advanced functionality, Cloudian stands by its claim as a bug-for-bug match with S3 for on-premise and hybrid cloud deployments.

Too Long; Didn’t Read…

When looking at deploying an open-hybrid cloud and/or moving data between S3 and your private cloud, it is of utmost importance that you understand the level of compatibility your storage platform claims versus its compatibility in reality. S3 is not going anywhere and if you’re reading this, there is a good chance you currently use or plan to use it, either exclusively or in a hybrid cloud environment. Choosing the right storage platform for your hybrid or private cloud can save you tons of money and shave months off of your time to deploy. Compatibility matters.

So, choose wisely.

– Steven Walchek, Business Development

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