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22 December 2011 | 2012 Prediction: Coraid
Cloud Architectures Will Require Elastic, Automated, Scale-out Storage Solutions in 2012
Darwin’s theory of evolution holds true in storage. It must evolve to survive.
Services like Facebook and Box.net have created the expectation among end users that they can access their applications and data anytime, anywhere and from any device. Employees bring these same expectations to work every day, while executives demand increasingly sophisticated analysis of data to drive business decisions. Data continues to grow at such a rapid clip that the costs of storing, analyzing and archiving massive amounts of data has swelled storage costs to over 40 percent of the enterprise IT budget. Entire new industries built around new, modern architectures are springing up to address the twin challenges of providing elastic, on-demand services with cost-effective but high-performance data storage.
The public cloud vendors are leading the innovation charge. Their business models require providing on-demand access to millions of users spread across geographies. Due to varying and unpredictable demand, they must be able to scale rapidly up and down to meet the needs of their clients, without overprovisioning a lot of capacity and thus increasing capital expense. To boost margins, they have become experts at automation – allowing a few people to manage vast amounts of customers and data while rapidly scaling services to meet growing needs.
The implications for data storage systems are profound. Google and Amazon did not build their clouds using legacy Fibre Channel SANs. These traditional storage architectures are far too expensive and complex, and cannot enable the flexibility and elasticity necessary to support automated cloud environments. Moreover, scale-up “big iron” architectures also require big up-front investments, complicating efforts to match demand growth with capital expenses.
Enterprise IT organizations are starting to take note. Driven by their increasingly sophisticated yet demanding end-users, CIOs are investing in cloud-style architectures that can deliver cost-effective, self-service enterprise computing. However, unlike cloud pioneers such as Amazon and Google, enterprises cannot afford to hire thousands of developers or spend years building their own storage and automation software. They need new options to handle the explosive growth of data, while delivering to their users the simplicity of the consumer Internet.
Fortunately, there is a new class of Ethernet SAN storage that mirrors the scale-out and off-the-shelf-hardware economics of the cloud. This new generation of storage, built on bare-metal 10 Gigabit Ethernet and radically simplified storage protocols, delivers faster performance than Fibre Channel at less than one-fifth of the cost, while eliminating multiple layers of complex storage management. Scaling out storage becomes as simple as plugging another storage system into the network. By eliminating layers of network complexity, reducing the cost of storage, and breaking the static connections of Fibre Channel, data center architects can provide the dynamic, elastic, cost-effective services their end-users demand.
As the saying goes, “change is the only constant,” and change is coming to IT departments in the form of employee demands for instant access to data on any device, anywhere, anytime. Change is also coming in the form of continued rapid data growth, in an era of flat or shrinking IT budgets. Organizations must adapt and embrace technologies to support the consumerization of IT, or their users will simply route around them instead.
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