"Cloud": looking at the emergence of cloud computing in the field of storage

Search giant Google, with its cloud computing technology, is at the forefront of a large data center architecture configuration. The Sun's chief technology officer, Greg Papadopoulos, used cloud computing as a spectral phenomenon called redshift (red Shift), and Sun is the only vendor in the market that offers a system architecture solution based on cloud computing ideas.

Astronomers often use the Doppler effect (Doppler multiplying) or redshift to define the expansion of the universe. In astronomy, the spectral shift of a celestial body to the red wavelength is called the redshift, and the redshift means that it is rapidly moving away from the earth. Greg Papadopoulos uses redshift to describe the consumption disorder in the IT industry, where the red shift is much more in the IT industry than in other industries, and consumer demand is growing exponentially.

For example, Google and Amazon are typical red-shift companies that need to improve their IT performance, storage capacity, and network functionality at an unprecedented rate, Papadopoulos said. It has been estimated that Google now has more than 500,000 servers, and Amazon and Microsoft have built many large data centers around the world to meet their own needs for servers, storage, networks, and 24 hours of uninterrupted work seven days a week.

But Google does not need Sans, it does not configure the Global NAS architecture, and replaces thousands of Linux server devices configured with cheap Das, and stores information content in its own Google File System (GFS). In this way, storage intelligence is effectively transferred from the array controller to the file system.

The explosion of massive data has made the red-shift companies abandon existing storage architectures. Google, Amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft need to continue to expand their capacity and storage access performance to meet the potential needs of future users. Traditional SAN and NAS storage architectures have been unable to meet the needs of petabytes of capacity-level data and applications, which require capturing continuously received data streams, providing read response time of less than 5 seconds, and ensuring storage security.

The current enterprise-class SAN storage device costs about $20 per gigabyte. By contrast, this cloud-computing storage device costs only 1 dollars per gigabyte. If at this cost level you are not buying EMC's Symmetrix or clariion arrays, IBM DS8000, DS4000, and. NetApp arrays and so on, so you can only buy cheap disks and assemble them in cheap or open-source software on inexpensive German servers.

The antithesis of SAN, Nas

Cloud computing is the antithesis of traditional sans and Nas. The good news is that only a handful of corporate organizations are planning to create cloud computing architectures to meet the needs of scale expansion. The bad news for SAN and NAS storage vendors is that too many vendors have started migrating their users to the Google and Amazon cloud computing platforms that use SaaS services.

For example:

Google introduces host Office applications

-amazon launched SimpleDB, S3 (simple Storage Service) storage service and elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service

Is cloud computing a fantasy or a reality?

The network-oriented services launched by Google, Amazon, Yahoo and Microsoft for interconnected multiple data centers reflect the inevitable trend of current market development. For competitive advantage, the details of the metadata Center architecture introduced by these vendors are externally confidential. Manufacturers have now provided their services to end-users (such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook) and business (Google EC2 and Amazon SimpleDB) as a network.

Cloud computing does not depend on a particular datacenter architecture, but cloud computing can be seen as an inevitable outcome of the development of grid and utility computing concepts. Multi-PB cloud computing storage can continue to expand each GB storage cost advantage, gradually replacing the traditional controller based array storage.

Now there is a general view that clustered NAS systems will become a common cloud storage architecture; Google's unique Google Cluster Server and DAS architecture can meet Google's search requirements. Clustered NAS systems are more universally applicable and require a larger global namespace for files, providing a reasonable system architecture for organizing thousands of files, File Protection, and file access.

Cloud storage has been gradually isolated from existing SAN and NAS storage because the array architecture requires fewer controllers, and cloud storage demands a different file system, which must have scalable and data protection capabilities in storage media. This is also an inevitable trend in the development of cloud storage, as no controller means no RAID hardware.

The file system is now available on the market: one is Google's GFs and the other is Sun's ZFS.

Can enterprise users who need petabytes of storage use cloud-computing storage modules? Obviously Isilon has already offered this product to its users, for example, Isilon users in the media field are using a clustered NAS system to transfer billions of bytes of video files to their users.

Other areas – especially those that require large, file-based, online data storage – such as pharmaceuticals and the geo-scientific institutions that use supercomputing, are also starting to apply cloud computing technology.

Cloud computing also has parallel processing capabilities compared to supercomputers, but the cost of cloud computing is lower.

Cloud based computing and storage devices are also attractive to small business users because they no longer need to manage their own it architectures to do those jobs. Cloud computing technology saves them a great deal of time and cost, allowing them to focus more on business development.

Google and Amazon say there are already thousands of small business users who are using cloud-based business-oriented services they offer. As these small businesses grow, their demand for IT services is growing, and cloud computing vendors can provide more technical services than traditional it vendors, while enabling large and medium-sized enterprise users to start using cloud-based technology services.

As a result, cloud computing will likely become a breakthrough new technology in the near future.

Many manufacturers compete for

There are no hardware vendors to launch cloud storage products, but manufacturers such as Sun have begun to develop products based on cloud technology concepts. Many manufacturers are also planning to provide enterprise users with cloud-based hardware and software products, or to the enterprise or end users to provide cloud-based storage services.

Amazon:

Amazon founder Jfe Bezos seems to be trying to transform Amazon into a new IT company in the 21st century. Amazon's IT architecture, launched in 2004, uses Linux servers, Oracle real creator clusters application clusters configured with HP MAS storage arrays. Amazon wants to be a cloud computing service provider that provides users with a trillion-tier computing business architecture based on Amazon.

EMC:

EMC has not yet launched a clustered NAS product, and Centera is an online archiving product for unstructured data information. But EMC has announced the launch of Hulk and main cluster NAS hardware and software products, and by next January EMC will likely announce some of the user names used for these new products.

hp：

Hewlett-Packard acquired some of the technical features of PolyServe by acquiring storage software maker PolyServe, although HP did not disclose specifics about its cloud computing technology, but Hewlett-Packard said on its blog that Amazon had become one of its users.

Google:

Google has its own research and development of the trillion-tier data center architecture, is the first provider of cloud computing server, which makes Google become the world's largest IT infrastructure manufacturers.

IBM:

IBM and Google work together with colleges and universities to build small cloud computing facilities, so that students of computer science can learn more about cloud computing's technical philosophy. IBM chief executive Sam Palmisano said: "In this project, IBM in the field of science, commerce, security transactions, the strength and advantages of Google in the network computing and large-scale cluster of professional technology to complement each other, the greatest extent to play the technical advantages of two manufacturers." We plan to train the people who participate in this project and develop software products that can meet the global network expansion needs and ensure hundreds of millions of security transactions per day. "

Isilon:

Isilon has an ever-improving cluster NAS product line, and recently announced the launch of the world's largest NAS cluster, which is configured with about 100 nodes and theoretically supports 2.3PB of storage capacity. Isilon, who has recently successfully financed the IPO, also said NASA is one of the users of Isilon cluster NAS products.

NETAPP:

NetApp provides clustering technology for NAS and SAN products operating systems ONTAP GX. However, NetApp is always lagging behind Isilon and other vendors in the cluster NAS domain, as it focuses on the mainstream enterprise users who bring them higher profits. If the future cloud-computing enterprise market has developed, it may be able to drive NetApp's enthusiasm in this area.

Sun:

Sun focuses on providing hardware and software products with rich cloud computing features. Sun launches ZFS file systems, low-end X4500 storage servers, and open source Solaris 10 software stacks. Sun's chief technology officer strongly supports cloud computing technology, and Sun is clearly aware that cloud technology will gradually become a mainstream trend in technology development.

Seagate：

Seagate made up for its lack of storage services by acquiring an online storage services company, Evault, and plans to provide online backup services to its data center users. In addition, Seagate acquired a metalincs electronic discovery manufacturer. Why not? Seagate has a lot to gain from disk drive products. It is possible that Seagate hopes to become one of the leading vendors to provide storage-based online services, or a cloud computing service provider, through the acquisition.