Cloud March: Private cloud storage System Purchase Guide

The continuous explosion of enterprise data has brought great difficulties to data management, and traditional storage products and technologies are becoming more and more difficult to meet the demand of storage system performance, and it is imperative to find an innovative data management method. The concept of cloud computing comes with the advantages of high performance, scalability, and reliability that bring a glimmer of light to the dark corporate IT sector. With all the hardware and software vendors in the direction of the cloud, the cloud is no longer high, but gradually approaching. Many companies that have been subject to massive data management problems are starting to stir.

Generally speaking, the first person to eat crabs, the benefits are enormous, but the risk of their choice in the face of the proportional. Although now many enterprises are ready for the cloud, but how to achieve the cloud is to touch a stone across the river. It is difficult to choose the hardware that is suitable for the cloud, especially the storage products that store the enterprise's important data information. Now there are many storage products in the market, there are suitable for the traditional data center, but also for the cloud, and even more claimed to be able to face both the traditional and cloud-oriented, promiscuous, dizzying. So how do you choose a storage system when you are moving toward the cloud?

To properly select a suitable storage system for the cloud, you must understand the characteristics of the cloud and the needs of the current and future business. The most attractive thing about the cloud is its dynamic scalability, high performance, and the need for new requirements that can dramatically shorten it deployment time. Based on these features, the storage systems that are one of the IT infrastructure are required to be highly available and easy to manage, in addition to their consistent performance.

The cloud appears to address the increasing amount of data raised by the storage, manage and deliver the performance challenges required by the business, the first solution to the cloud-oriented storage system is performance issues, which must provide sufficient performance to meet current business requirements and, in the context of increasing business requirements, Its performance can also be upgraded on demand. In addition, performance optimization is also necessary, for example, it is well known that the data are "cold" "hot" points, if all the data are stored in a disk array, will inevitably affect the system to "hot" data reading speed, and thus affect the storage system performance. It is often done by storing "cold" hot data in a tiered manner, storing "cold" data in a relatively inexpensive, high-capacity disk, and storing "hot" data in a near-line SAS disk or SSD, improves access to frequently read data and lowers the overall cost of the enterprise.

Second, in addition to providing the performance to meet the new business, the storage system must also provide the storage space needed to increase the amount of data. Now there is almost a consensus in the industry, the growth of enterprise data is not controllable, is not accurate prediction, who can not predict how much data will be produced next year, which requires storage system to provide a broad capacity growth space. However, in the initial procurement phase, the enterprise is unlikely to buy the upper capacity at a draught, which requires the storage system to build automatic compact configuration and Hot plug technology, the majority of the market today, almost all of the high-end storage systems support these features.

In addition to scalable capacity, its support for heterogeneous platforms is also important. In addition to protecting the investment and expansion of enterprises, it will bring some other benefits to the enterprise. Enterprise data is very important, in addition to storing this data, enterprises can take other measures to ensure that the data is not lost, not damage, such as backup, disaster recovery. When the enterprise deploys the backup, disaster-tolerant solution, it usually adopts virtual tape library, tape library or storage system, then the compatible support of the new storage system to the old storage system and other hardware becomes extremely important.

In addition to providing resilient performance and capacity, the storage system must also feature high reliability and ease of management. High reliability is used to maximize business continuity and prevent business disruption due to hardware failure. Ease of use assists IT managers in managing the entire IT infrastructure, such as automatic detection, automatic error correction, and so on, which can significantly reduce the difficulty of IT system management and reduce the cost of enterprise human input.

Using the factors described above, you can filter out some storage systems that are suitable for cloud transitions, such as EMC's Vmax, HP 3PAR, IBM's XIV, HDS company USP, and Dell's compellent, and so on, to provide the performance and requirements that the enterprise needs to reach the cloud, Although the architectures and technologies used by different companies differ, they can meet the needs of users.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)