EDITOR’S NOTE SEVEN QUESTIONS TO ASK A POTENTIAL PUBLIC CLOUD STORAGE PROVIDER

MANAGING CLOUD STORAGE: TOOLS TO CONTROL YOUR DEPLOYMENT

IT’S TIME TO UNDERSTAND THE FINER DETAILS OF THE CLOUD

Avoid Cloud Storage Headaches With A Little Bit of HomeworkCloud storage experts share their best practices and technical tips for mastering the complexities of using cloud storage services.

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EDITOR’SNOTE

Cloud Talk: Up Close and Practical

Experienced storage professionals who have to play the role of detective and investigate their cloud options will often share the same frustration—a lack of specifics. That’s because once you’re in cloud territory, you’ll notice that many times the conversations become less about the technical nitty-gritty and more about grand visions of cost-savings and simplicity. Ask someone how they’re using the cloud and you’re likely to get the name of their provider and the application they’re run-ning in the cloud.

You’ll have to push for the particulars you need to know to green-light your own cloud project. How is your cloud provider protect-ing data? Is it replicated across regions? Have you ever seen your provider’s physical facility? Those are simple enough questions, but ones that usually have to be drawn out of people. And what about more complex questions: Should you care whether your provider is using

multi-copy mirroring or erasure codes? Is a customer paying less on variable workloads some months versus others?

The bottom line is that because cloud cus-tomers pay as they go, they often pay the price for not being quite sure of what they’re getting. For starters, many analysts and experts say IT pros aren’t asking cloud vendors tough enough questions about how they operate. They also aren’t learning enough in advance about the various architectural requirements for different scenarios, such as hybrid clouds, cloud storage and cloud used primarily for backup.

Our team of experts and analysts can help change that, and this collection of practical advice can get you on the road to solving any cloud mysteries, and ensuring your cloud proj-ect delivers on its sky-high potential. n

Ellen O’BrienExecutive Editor, SearchCloudStorage

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Seven Questions to Ask a Potential Public Cloud Storage Provider

Though they may look quite similar, real differences exist among the major public cloud storage provider offerings, so you need to care-fully assess services upfront and evaluate them against your particular storage requirements.

Start by looking at service terms and capa-bilities, which can vary by provider. To get a feel for the level of service commitments a pro-vider is willing to make on your behalf, review its service-level agreement (SLA) and the fre-quently asked questions section on each pro-vider’s website. You can then narrow the list of provider candidates based on which ones come closest to meeting your workload and service-level requirements.

A rough analysis of the costs you’re likely to incur is next. Storage service costs can fall into several categories, depending on whether you’re looking at block storage or object stor-age. For example, in the case of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Block Storage (EBS),

you’ll pay a few cents per month for each gigabyte of standard provisioned storage and for every million input/output requests made against your standard EBS volumes. The cor-responding charges for “provisioned IOPS volumes” (designed for low latency and a mini-mum level of IOPS) are a bit higher. If you elect to periodically snapshot your EBS volumes to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), you’ll pay a few cents per month per gigabyte of data stored.

One example of object storage pricing is the way Amazon charges differently for each class of S3 storage (standard versus reduced redundancy). There are specific monthly costs for the number and size of objects stored, the number and type of object operational requests (Get, Put, Copy and so on) made via the REST application programming interface and the amount of data transferred out of a given S3 region. These storage costs may seem

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insignificant in the beginning, but they can add up quickly as your AWS storage installa-tion grows.

If you’re considering running key applica-tions and/or data sets in the public cloud, you should try to talk with customers of each cloud storage provider’s service. In this instance, strongly consider paying for support services, since your workloads and associated storage won’t tolerate excessive downtime or other service issues. For example, Amazon now offers several tiers of premium support, with services geared toward developers, midsize businesses and enterprise customers. You can speak with technically savvy support repre-sentatives about guaranteed response times, receive guidance on best practices, and access diagnostic tools and architectural and opera-tional consulting resources to support your own AWS infrastructure development or expansion efforts. Cloud storage support services can be a bit pricey, especially for high-volume customers, but they’ll likely be worth the money if you’re running important workloads or managing key infrastructure initiatives on a public cloud site.

PROBING FOR THE DETAILS

Once you’ve scoped out the basic costs and terms of each cloud provider’s service, you can probe for more details about overall stor-age service capabilities. To assist in that effort, these seven questions should provide you with the answers you need during your due diligence process:

1. How easy is it to import data into the cloud storage service?

2. How secure will my data be, both in motion and at rest? (Look for evidence of physical facilities security as well as firewalls, data encryption and access controls.)

3. What provisions, if any, are in place to protect and preserve my data, for example, via replication across availability zones and/or regions?

4. How many 9s of availability does the provider’s SLA guarantee? How is the term availability defined, and what kind of credits (or other compensation) will I receive in

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the event of downtime?

5. What about traditional data protection? Are snapshot and/or backup services provided?

6. What will my total monthly cost likely be, including all charges on the provider’s rate card?

7. In the event I decide to terminate the cloud storage service, what is the process and cost

for moving my data back to my data center or to a different provider’s site? How can I be sure that all of my data has been fully deleted upon exit?

You should be satisfied with the answers to each of these questions before making a deci-sion on a specific cloud storage provider and service. If you do your homework in advance, you’re much more likely to be happy with your public cloud storage experience. —Arun Taneja

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Managing Cloud Storage: Tools to Control Your Deployment

Those of us in IT must have a thing about stovepipes. How else can you explain our pro-pensity to create them? That might be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but we do spend an inor-dinate amount of time deploying technology and then figuring out how to integrate it with everything else we have in the data center. Cloud computing is the most recent example. We deploy applications in third-party data centers to gain the benefits of rapid deploy-ment and lower unit cost only to learn that its management is opaque and full of hidden “gotchas.”

When it comes to storage, Storage as a Ser-vice, Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service providers may offer some level of insight regarding such things as capacity usage (especially to bill for it), uptime service-level agreements (SLAs) and often not much else.

Even with more advanced reporting capa-bilities, the provider’s environment is still an

entirely separate entity from the rest of the organization’s IT estate. Any effort at cost optimization, deployment efficiency or visibil-ity must be undertaken on an almost entirely manual basis. Having to manage multiple application deployment models further inhibits a key IT goal: agility.

While the deployment-stovepipe-integration progression seems like a vicious cycle, it’s the order of technology maturity. Fortunately, some of this maturity is seeping into the cloud envi-ronment. Most IT organizations have at least dabbled in cloud computing, making the hybrid cloud model the dominant one demanding attention.

A NEW STORAGE MANAGEMENT MODEL

There will always be a need for low-level stor-age management that focuses on physical attri-butes, but correlating private (in-house) storage

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deployments with cloud deployments requires a higher-level view of the different estates. In public cloud environments, IT managers have little say over specific configurations, other than the providers’ SLAs. What this requires, then, is the ability to control deployments through business-level integration points such as authentication, change management and audit/compliance management. Specific requirements will vary depending on whether the deployment is primarily private cloud, hybrid cloud or backup/recovery-specific. The solution will also depend on whether the deployment is conducted in-house by the IT department or provided by the cloud provider.

BMC Software Inc. has addressed the hybrid cloud use case with two different, but com-plementary, offerings: BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management (CLM) and BMC Cloud Opera-tions Management. BMC CLM is designed to perform application workload management, rather than just systems and storage manage-ment. The key to CLM is the policy engine that drives decision support. Policy engine parameters include such things as performance requirements, security needs, capacity, physical

location and lifecycle stage (i.e., development vs. production). The result should be sugges-tions regarding an “informed choice” about the appropriate platform for optimal deployment.

To make CLM function in a hybrid environ-ment, BMC has implemented API connections to third-party clouds. Supported environments include Amazon Web Services, CenturyLink Technology Solutions (formerly Savvis) and Microsoft Azure. With these APIs, organiza-tions can have a consolidated view of their entire cloud computing estate. It will help users to understand how data moves from point to point and how the workload is performing.

BMC Cloud Operations Management pro-vides a lower-level view of the cloud environ-ment. This view includes storage, as well as the other infrastructure and application stacks. It can assist in root-cause analysis, performance analysis, capacity planning and forecasting. Without a tool to look at the IT environment holistically, IT managers would need multiple tools and manual correlation of events and trends. From a process perspective, BMC tools help pull cloud operations into IT Infrastruc-ture Library (ITIL) and IT Service Management

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(ITSM) compliance to effectively manage change control, patch management and audit-ing across the estate, whether the infrastruc-ture is privately or publicly hosted.

KEEPING TABS ON CONTENT SHARING

Content sharing is another popular use case for hybrid cloud storage environments. Organiza-tions that leverage content-sharing providers need to ensure their provider meets enterprise-level data management requirements. Box is an example of a company targeting the enterprise content-sharing market. Box frames its offer-ing around four aspects of access:

■n Users: profiles, access patterns and security■n Devices: thin devices, bring your device and mobile devices

■n Applications: update control and retention■n Intelligence: reporting

The fundamentals of file sharing are inherent to the Box environment. This includes integra-tion with Active Directory, plus single sign-on and two-factor authentication. Security is

enhanced based on “behavior-based” security to detect suspicious activity. When this activ-ity is detected, an additional verification step is required. Activity reporting helps storage administrators to manage the environment effectively.

Box also looks at the data management eco-system to leverage functionality from other organizations. Integration examples include data-loss prevention products, such as Cipher-Cloud for Box, Code Green Networks’ Cloud Content Control and the Proofpoint Data Loss Prevention Solution. Mobile device manage-ment integration comes from the likes of AirWatch, Good Technology, IBM’s Fiberlink MaaS360 and others. This saves an IT organi-zation from having to integrate and manage the various aspects of content collaboration.

TRADITIONAL STORAGE VENDORS

OFFER CLOUD CONTROLS

While BMC and Box are examples of more broad-based cloud management, EMC Corp. is leveraging its experience in storage man-agement to address cloud storage specifically.

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EMC’s value proposition is to offer a “cloud-like experience,” meaning reduced complex-ity and faster provisioning regardless of cloud type. The company’s ViPR software is designed to give a single view to all cloud storage, whether it’s public or private. Moreover, this management view extends to both EMC or non-EMC arrays in the storage pool. The pool is managed as a single entity for such things as provisioning and capacity planning, while the underlying storage retains its native capa-bilities. Third-party interfaces currently sup-ported include Amazon S3, OpenStack Swift and other REST-based APIs; others are planned in the future.

Like EMC, Symantec Corp. has a long heri-tage as a data center storage management ven-dor. It’s working to translate those capabilities into cloud environments through Veritas Oper-ations Manager, the user interface for Syman-tec Storage Foundation. This transformation is beginning in the private cloud with an empha-sis on multi-tenancy, whereby business units are treated like tenants. This includes role-based access that provides greater self-service with a custom application-owner dashboard

and reporting capabilities. Even so, it remains a tool focused on the needs of the storage administrator. Other features include Smart-Tier, SmartIO and flexible storage sharing that benefits the user, but are certainly “under the hood” from a user perspective. Syman-tec expects to extend these capabilities to the hybrid cloud environment in the future.

BACKUP CLOUD MANAGEMENT

Among backup and recovery cloud provid-ers, Mozy, a unit of EMC, is a purpose-built, small enterprise and remote office/branch office backup service in the cloud. Mozy pro-vides users with a dashboard to understand the environment. This includes tracking individual machines (i.e., identifying those that haven’t been backed up in a certain time period), groups, quota management, performance management and daily reports. Access can be controlled through Active Directory or any Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) device. Encryption is available with standard Mozy or custom key management. In late 2013, the company released APIs to allow access to

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its environment for third-party reporting prod-ucts. Presently, this doesn’t include any special plug-ins for specific products, but it can be customized for any product or to give alerts to remote network monitoring dashboards.

Asigra Inc. is another cloud backup provider, but with a different market angle from Mozy and similar services. Asigra Cloud Backup is installed by providers, such as Amazon and IBM, to give backup functionality to their cloud subscribers. It can be installed in private, pub-lic or hybrid environments. Backups can flow from private to public cloud repositories, from

public to private cloud repositories, and even public to public cloud repositories. A provided dashboard identifies what data is being backed up, what’s being restored and why it’s being restored. Reasons for restores may include hardware failure, software malfunction or user error. Regardless, it gives IT managers the ability to remediate problem areas as they’re identified.

Data remains a key asset for most orga-nizations. As the cloud storage marketplace matures, organizations need to understand how that data is being managed and not simply trust that the cloud provider has everything under control. While most cloud providers are trustworthy, a measure of verification can avoid unpleasant surprises. Cloud storage manage-ment tools give users the control they need to feel comfortable with the solution. —Phil Goodwin

While most cloud providers are trustworthy, a measure of verification can avoid unpleasant surprises.

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OPTIONS IN THE CLOUD

It’s Time to Understand the Finer Details of the Cloud

The cloud has given customers more technology choices, but more choices often lead to more confusion. Understanding whether it’s better to use multi-copy mirror-ing or erasure codes to protect data could be an important factor in choosing a cloud pro-vider, while knowing the distinction between scalability and elasticity helps to balance stor-age resources with usage demands. And while location awareness may sound like a vague term, it’s a key cloud capability for reducing latency. Knowing the fine points can make it easier to make choices.

Does it matter whether multi-copy

mirroring (MCM) or erasure codes

are used by my cloud provider?

In my experience, most users don’t care whether their public cloud provider uses MCM or erasure codes—but they should. The short answer is that erasure codes offer a better

guarantee that your data will be protected. But since the price per gigabyte is approximately the same for companies that use MCM—Google and Amazon, for example—and offer-ings with erasure coding—such as Microsoft’s Azure—many customers ignore this debate when choosing a provider. However, MCM gen-erally uses more storage, and is less resilient, than erasure codes.

With MCM, you’re protected against only two concurrent losses. MCM is most effec-tive when the mirrored object has some form of autonomic healing that periodically checks data object health and corrects it if there are any issues. If a disk drive or node has failed, gone dark, isn’t there or comes back corrupted, the storage system will make another copy from a healthy version of the data objects and write them somewhere else. This system works pretty well, but it has a high cost associated with it because protecting against a single data

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object failure requires 100% additional stor-age capacity and nodes. Protecting against two concurrent data object failures requires 200% additional storage capacity and nodes; three concurrent failures require 300% and so on. It’s an extremely high overhead.

With autonomic healing, erasure codes change that equation by protecting against six or more concurrent drive, node, system, site or other failures. It does this by dividing a data object into a number of chunks, the total being referred to as the width. A common width is 16 chunks. The object storage has to read only a subset of those chunks (referred to as the breadth) to reconstitute the data object. A com-mon breadth is 10 chunks. In this example, the object storage system can tolerate six concur-rent failures of drives, nodes, sites and so on, and still read the data objects. Autonomic heal-ing enables the lost chunks to be recreated and written elsewhere. This example demonstrates three times the resilience of MCM at one-fifth the overhead. You therefore should care which data protection method is implemented by a cloud provider because it is more likely that data objects will be there when they’re needed

if erasure codes are used.However, nothing is perfect. A downside to

erasure codes is that additional latency can reduce performance. Depending on how many other latencies you are introducing, this can be an important factor to consider.

What are the differences between

storage scalability and elasticity?

Storage scalability is commonly measured in terms of capacity and performance. Capacity scalability is how much capacity the storage system can address, manage and support with acceptable performance. There are several storage systems that can address a lot of capac-ity as long as acceptable performance isn’t a requirement. There are others that can address, support and manage even more capacity while maintaining acceptable performance regardless of the scale. Performance scalability is the storage system’s ability to scale performance with or without capacity in the form of IOPS and/or throughput. These are terms most storage pros are familiar with.

However, elasticity is a relatively new storage concept. It originated with grid technologies,

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server virtualization and the cloud. It refers to the capability of a storage system to adapt to variable workload changes by allocating and deallocating resources as required by each app. That allocation and deallocation occurs in real-time and is based on defaults or pre-established policies—without human intervention. The key issue is the ability to respond to both increased and decreased demands as they’re happening autonomically. This is especially important for storage com-pute, storage memory and storage caching.

Storage resource demand is, for the most part, a lumpy, non-linear process with imper-fect predictability—there are always ebbs and flows. Not all applications require peak per-formance all the time. Some applications may require peak resources at the end of a quarter or during the early morning hours. Others may not require peak resources except during a specific quarter during the year, such as retail. Elasticity allows the system to respond to the “lumpiness” of the demand cost-effectively. When a storage system does not have elastic-ity, the storage admin must plan for the worst and build out that storage system for the very

peak of demand for all applications concur-rently. Doing so enables smooth operations during peak demand, but it does require over-provisioning and buying excessive processing, memory, cache and capacity. This is extremely inefficient and costly.

Finally, if a storage system is elastic, then the feature is built into the software. If the elastic-ity is in the hypervisor—VMware VSAN—it’s also built-in, but with more limitations.

What does location awareness mean

in the context of cloud storage?

The first thing to remember with regard to location awareness is that cloud storage is not geographically aware in the literal sense.

That means it does not actually know where it is based on global positioning system coor-dinates. Instead, it can measure the latency between the cloud storage and the applica-tions accessing the data on that cloud storage. Because latency equates to distance, the cloud storage knows how far away the stored data is from the application. Simply put, cloud stor-age location awareness means the cloud stor-age is aware of where it resides relative to the

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application reading or writing the data. It uses that awareness, based on policies, to place fre-quently accessed data as close as possible to the application or the user accessing it.

This type of location awareness enables a user or administrator to set policies that opti-mize response times for specific workloads or datasets by reducing latency. It can reduce latency by copying, moving or migrating the data to a portion of the cloud storage that is closer to the application—when measured by the round-trip latency. This comes in handy when access to the data objects is widely dis-persed. This is often the case in industries such as financial services, oil and gas, and healthcare.

But location awareness is by no means a perfect methodology if your goal is reducing latency and increasing performance. It takes time to copy and move data, especially if there is a lot of data. There are also issues that arise when several users need to alter or modify the data objects in parallel. Merging the distinct versions of those data objects back together requires human intervention or a syncing application, such as a file sync-and-share app. Location awareness is best suited for dispersed

distributed read access. The good news is that this awareness is usually available in cloud storage products without additional products or software licensing.

Can you tell me if primary data is a good

fit for the cloud or object technologies?

The answer to this question used to be simple: an automatic thumbs-down. Due to latency issues, primary storage just wasn’t a good fit for the cloud and object storage. But today that answer, like cloud technology itself, is chang-ing quickly due to powerful improvements in object storage technology.

In the past, transaction-oriented applica-tions such as online transaction processing and online analytical processing didn’t find object storage and cloud performance levels accept-able. That’s not necessarily the situation today.

Here’s the updated answer to the question: It depends on the application, users and your performance expectations. The issue is always latency, and that’s because object technolo-gies require more processing and more writ-ing and reading the data—or objects—due to the extensive metadata available. The amount

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of metadata per object is much larger than that in file systems and can be variable. This adds latency. If the object storage utilizes era-sure coding, even more processing is required, which adds more latency. To that you can add in the additional latency related to Internet and user connections. More latency equals longer response times or slower performance.

But just as file storage performance has improved significantly over the years, object storage is seeing rapid and, in some cases, radi-cal performance improvement. Several vendors have improved object storage performance through the use of clever algorithms, effec- tive use of caching, parallel processing and/or workload prioritization. The effect has been noticeably reduced latency and better response times that are equivalent to iSCSI SAN or

fast file storage. Indeed, there are scale-out iSCSI or NAS vendors that actually utilize object technologies underneath. Additionally, more and more object storage products have iSCSI, Network File System and/or Common Interface File System interfaces that have the performance normally associated with those systems but at object storage economics and resilience.

When that storage is co-located with the application compute platform—thereby elimi-nating the Internet or WAN latency—it’s no longer a given that object storage and the cloud are not good for primary data. A better way to look at object storage and primary application data is whether or not it is good enough for your particular performance requirements. —Marc Staimer

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ABOUT THE

AUTHORS

ARUN TANEJA is founder and president at Taneja Group, an analyst and consulting group focused on storage and storage-centric server technologies.

PHIL GOODWIN is a storage consultant and freelance writer.

MARC STAIMER is the founder and senior analyst at Dragon Slayer Consulting in Beaverton, Oregon.

Avoid Cloud Storage Headaches With a Little Bit of Homework is a SearchCloudStorage.com e-publication.

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