Workload Centric Scale-Out Storage forNext Generation Datacenter with SolidFire All-Flash and Cloudian HyperStore®

OPTIMIZING STORAGE FOR THE RIGHT WORKLOADS WITH

CONSIDERATIONS FOR FUTURE NEEDS THROUGH SCALE-OUT

TECHNOLOGIES FOR BOTH PERFORMANCE AND PRICE CONCERNS

The Challenge

Today’s storage infrastructure is being tested by some major trends in data use:

• The need for immediate real time transactions at massive volume and smart real-time analytics to optimize that experience.

• The huge growth in multimedia content with everyone a photographer, film maker, musician or sound engineer due to the technology capabilities in our mobile devices.

• Explosive growth in unstructured data from mobile devices to machine generated data as the “Internet of Things” becomes a reality.

• Our desire to store, retain and analyze all data created from all sources. This is leading to a bifurcation of how we store and access data; from using

hot lightning fast storage such as flash based technology to reduce access and processing times for business critical data to the use of cloud storage for accessing data anywhere, anytime, at a low cost where performance is not as critical.

Meeting the technology needs of the modern enterprise is often a compromise between delivering demanding service levels such as performance, availability, scalability, and managing aggressive cost targets to drive business profitability. Not only do we have to worry about today’s needs, but also the future challenges we cannot predict and ensure we have the agility built into the IT infrastructure to deliver to the demands of the business as new opportunities arise.

Data storage fortifies all aspects of enterprise IT, but typical storage solutions on the market today are similar to a Swiss Army knife, they do many things at a mediocre/reasonable level in a single package.

With the need to store more data, access data more quickly whereas maintaining levels of accessibility, and protection that are demanded now and into the future, traditional methods of data storage are struggling to cope with the data onslaught. The time has come to separate the mass unstructured data which comprises of 80% or more of all data from the structured data that needs high transactional capability and evaluate how applications and workloads create and access data and ensure that you have a storage platform optimized for now and the future.

SOLUTION GUIDE

Broadly speaking, we can separate data access workloads into two categories; performance optimized or capacity optimized.

For cost efficiency each type of workload should be maximized to address the greatest return on investment for the job the technology is deployed to deliver. Performance storage should be measured on $/Transactions (reads and writes), how many operations can be processed in a second. Capacity storage should be measured on $/GB, how much storage space do you get for your money. Of course other service level affecting considerations need to be factored in such as system up time, data protection, disaster recovery, global access, security, etc.

Getting back to the uncertainty of the future, being able to deploy an infrastructure today that will scale easily to meet future needs provides the reassurance that your service levels and costs are firmly under control.

Solution Overview

For performance workloads, SolidFire provides a scale-out all-flash storage platform designed to deliver guaranteed storage performance to thousands of application workloads side-by-side, allowing performance workload consolidation under a single storage platform. The SolidFire system can be combined together over standard networking technologies in clusters ranging from 4 to 100 nodes, providing high performance capacity from 35TB to 3.4PB, and can deliver between 200,000 and 7.5M guaranteed IOPS to more than 100,000 volumes / applications within a single cluster.

Performance Optimized Workloads

• Production VM Infrastructure• Structured Data• OLTP Databases• Email• ERP and CRM Systems• Cloud Primary Storage• VDI

Capacity Optimized Workloads

• Unstructured Data – not in databases• Backup and Snapshots• Email Archives• Archives• Cloud Secondary Storage• Big Data• Log

Prod VM Farm, DBs, VDI IO Sensitive Workloads

Performance Oriented Workloads

Performance Oriented Workloads

HIGH PERFORMANCE INTERCONNECT

(iSCSI/FC)

Optimized for $/IOPs Performance

DIRECTBACKUPS

VIA S3

Backup/Archive, Big Data, Media Content Large Capacity Workloads

Capacity Oriented Workloads

Optimized for $/GB Capacity

S3 APIINTERCONNECT

Geo Cluster

Figure 1 - Performance Optimized Workloads and Capacity Optimized Workloads

The Cloudian HyperStore® Solution and Benefits

Cloudian HyperStore® software is a fully S3 API compliant, multi-tenant, multi-datacenter hybrid cloud storage software. Cloud service providers use Cloudian HyperStore software to deploy public clouds and managed private clouds whereas enterprises use Cloudian HyperStore software to deploy private and hybrid clouds.

You can deploy Cloudian HyperStore as software to be implemented atop your existing storage infrastructure, or as a fully integrated rack-ready appliance. Both deployment options deliver multi-datacenter storage with no constraints on data size, unlimited scale, optional data tiering to any S3 cloud, and support for all S3 ecosystem applications.

Workload Optimized Storage infrastructure

SolidFire supports IO intensive workloads whereas Cloudian HyperStore supports capacity intensive workloads1

Cost Efficiency Deploy storage with the best ROI for your use case, focused on $/IOP or $/GB5

Scale-Out Performance and capacity scale for now and future needs2

Energy Efficiency Greatest density of both IOPs and GB per rack footprint6

Multi-Tenancy Single platform for hosting multiple applications/clients3

Open Standards Restful API for standardization of automation tasks7

Security 256- bit AES at rest encryption9

Quality of Service (QoS) Guaranteed IOPs and limits on “noisy neighbors”4

Industry Standard Hardware

Both platforms leverage x86 server hardware with no proprietary lock-in8

Integration S3 backup and restore of LUNs from flash storage to cost effective storage10

KEY BENEFITS OF THE SOLIDFIRE AND CLOUDIAN JOINT SOLUTION

Solution Design Tenants

Let’s take a closer look at how the two platforms match up in terms of design tenants, but with a

different workload focus.

1. Workload Optimized Storage Infrastructure

Deploying SolidFire flash storage for the IO intensive workloads and Cloudian HyperStore for

the capacity intensive workloads ensures that the appropriate workloads are served by the most

appropriate storage platform. For example, we can ensure that the IO hungry OLTP database is

being served data quick enough from SolidFire flash storage to deliver the best end user experience,

or ensure that a large backup stream is written quickly and safely to disk storage at an appropriate

price point with Cloudian HyperStore.

2. Cost Efficiency

To ensure the best return on investment, applications should be assessed for performance and

capacity characteristics to determine which storage profile should be considered, enabling a

decision to be made whether to deploy storage focused on $/IOP or $/GB. Storage is not just about

gigabytes these days, the responsiveness to end users is crucial. SolidFire brings data deduplication

and flash storage together to optimize that $/IOPs metric and provide the performance that the

most IO intensive application requires, whereas Cloudian HyperStore can offer a storage platform

for massive data sets at public cloud pricing levels.

3. Scale Out – Performance and Capacity Scale for Now and the Future

Typical storage platforms (scale-up) are bound by limited scalability, both performance and capacity

constraints, typically imposed by the fundamental architecture of these solutions. (Dual storage

controllers with SAS attached JBODs). At the upper limits of these platforms, organizations have

no other choice than to introduce more boxes and ultimately end up with a data and device

management nightmare, data in silos and an ineffective cost model as management software needs

to be purchased over and over again as additional boxes are added to reach the scalability required.

With both SolidFire and Cloudian providing scale-out architectures, adding additional performance

and capacity is as easy as adding the next node into the existing cluster. Smart data balancing

technology ensures that data is re-distributed across the new nodes to eliminate hot spots within

the cluster and of course the additional nodes are all part of the same system, therefore only one

system to manage and license.

Ultimately this provides the IT department with one less headache as they can be confident that

whatever is thrown at them, they have storage platforms in place that can deal with new challenges.

4.Multi-tenancy – Single Platform for Hosting Multiple Applications/Clients

With any technology acquisition you want to utilize the resources efficiently and effectively which

typically means that you will run multiple workloads and support lots of users on the same platform.

This is where security is key and one user cannot access the data of another sharing the same

platform. This is especially true in a hosting environment where different users could actually be

from different organizations and indeed in competition with each other.

Both SolidFire and Cloudian platforms have been designed to ensure that the infrastructure can be

shared amongst many users and workloads in order to support multiple use cases simultaneously

without concern of data being accessed by the wrong users or groups of users.

5. Quality of Service (QoS) – Guaranteed IOPs and Limits on “Noisy Neighbors”

Similarly to the above, in a multi user/workload environment the noisy neighbor issue can arise,

where one user or workload runs amiss and tries to grab as much hardware resource as possible

for its own use. QoS provides a way to limit the resource allocated to individual users, groups and

workloads to ensure that there is a fair distribution of resources as appropriate, or even to the

point that resources can be managed, allocated and billed according to upfront determined usage

requirements.

6. Energy Efficient – Greatest Density of Both IOPs and GB per Rack Footprint

Energy consumption is a consideration that all have when running a datacenter in these modern

times, being “eco-friendly” can be a competitive advantage, saving energy equals saving money.

Leveraging flash storage within a SolidFire solution delivers high performance at low energy

consumption levels, a fraction compared to traditional spinning drives of the 10K and 15K RPM and

combined with data duplication technologies, storage devices are minimized as any duplicated data

is removed from being stored at all. Cloudian HyperStore provides huge scale-out architectures

leveraging extreme dense storage technologies utilizing industry standard x86 hardware combined

with compression technology to reduce the data footprint.

7. Open Standards – Restful API for Standardization of Automation Tasks

In the modern datacenter the ability to integrate applications and infrastructure components with

each other has become vital to build out orchestrated cloud environments that provide for

automated IT service offerings. Time to provision is now measured in seconds/minutes rather than

hours/days/weeks and this is facilitated by common framework languages that are supported by

multiple devices/platforms. The Restful API is crucial to this, allowing communication between

propriety systems to link tasks and events, providing integration levels previously unobtainable with

legacy platforms.

A great example of SolidFire and Cloudian working

together to deliver appropriate storage for appropriate

data sets is with backup of the primary data sets located

on the SolidFire platform directly onto a Cloudian

platform using the S3 Restful API.

A simple scheduled job can be set to automate the

regular backup of SolidFire snapshots to the low cost,

multi-datacenter aware, Cloudian archive platform and

no expensive complicated backup software impending.

Restore Backup

Figure 2 - SolidFire and Cloudian Backup Joint Solution

Conclusion

Together SolidFire and Cloudian provide a best of breed storage infrastructure that allows organizations to deploy the most appropriate technology for the relevant workloads and data sets, ensuring that when storage is needed, it is optimized for $/IOP and $/GB.

No infrastructure design sacrifice has to be made as both platforms deliver the scalability, management and cost measures that are needed in today’s modern datacenter. These design tenants can be applied across both performance and capacity hungry workloads equally to ensure that the datacenter built today is ready for tomorrow’s challenges.

Get started today and receive 10TB for free with Cloudian’s Community Edition:http://www.cloudian.com/fee-trial/

About SolidFire

SolidFire is the market leader in all-flash storage systems built for the Next Generation Data Center.Leveraging SolidFire’s all-flash architecture, with volume-level Quality of Service (QoS) controls,customers now can guarantee storage performance to thousands of applications within a sharedinfrastructure. Coupling this functionality with in-line data reduction techniques and system-wideautomation results in substantial capital and operating cost savings relative to traditional disk and basic all-flash storage systems.

About Cloudian

Cloudian is a Silicon Valley-based software company specializing in enterprise-grade storage. Its flagship product, Cloudian HyperStore®, is an S3-compatible storage platform that enables service providers and enterprises to build reliable, affordable and scalable hybrid cloud storage solutions.

Follow us on Twitter @CloudianStorage

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©2015 Cloudian, Inc. Cloudian, the Cloudian logo, and HyperStore are registered trademarks or trademarks of Cloudian, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective holders.

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