How to select a storage platform to deploy the cloud

One of the key decisions in setting up a private cloud infrastructure is to choose the storage platform where the cloud is deployed. Storage is a key component of the infrastructure that plays a pivotal role in the overall performance of the private cloud. In addition, because the storage decision involves a relatively large scale of investment, the cycle is longer, so its importance is stronger.

When choosing the right platform, there are several factors that must be taken into account: protocol, capacity, performance, scalability, manageability, and cost. In addition to the determinants of these criteria, you also need to make sure that the storage devices you choose are not in a vacuum beyond the network, computing, and automation/organization platforms. Storage devices must be seamlessly integrated with the infrastructure ecosystem as much as possible.

The protocol is the hottest issue in storage today. The Fibre Channel storage network is currently the most used storage network in enterprise data centers, and iSCSI and NFS play a more important role. In addition, the Ethernet Fibre Channel (FCoE) standard has been formed, the product has been launched in the market for several years, end-to-end system has been mature. As an industry, because of the advantages of network consolidation, it is now mainly in the direction of Ethernet or IP protocol (ISCSI, NFS and FCoE), but Fibre Channel still occupies a large market share, because it still has a great advantage in traditional investment, performance reliability and customer trust.

What kind of protocol you choose will play a big part in overall decision making, as it can and continues to decide which manufacturer's products and platforms to use. In addition, it affects the overall design, architecture, and type of infrastructure. The key is to ensure the flexibility of the platform and provide the required protocols for the various services you plan to deploy on the infrastructure. In most environments, both modular and file-based storage requirements exist. If you choose Fibre Channel storage to meet your module storage needs, you will need to have a separate private network (typically 2 to be used as a fallback), as are some iSCSI stores.

Scalability is another factor. Fibre Channel standards are currently in 16gbit,32gbit. Ethernet based deployments are typically 10Gbit and will later be in the direction of 40Gbit and 100Gbit. With the rapid growth of Ethernet lines and bandwidth management capabilities, time is just enough to migrate to an Ethernet based storage protocol.

Capacity and scalability are also important considerations for customers. The maximum disk capacity of a traditional storage system is determined by the number of disks they support and the size of those disks. That is to say, the maximum capacity is usually confusing to the customer, because the performance will be tied to the number of disks without such functions as rating and caching. So you have to be equipped with more disks to ensure IOPS performance, and a lot of spare storage capacity that is not used.

You want to choose a storage platform that can be flexibly scaled to meet your capacity requirements in the lifecycle of your infrastructure. Another option is to select a storage pod, or an infrastructure pod that includes storage. In this way, you need to buy pod or infrastructure pod based on the performance of the service level protocol, such as IOPS, virtual machines, etc. The key to this approach is the need for an automated/organizational platform that can manage multiple pods.

Performance is significant for any storage deployment platform. In a typical private cloud deployment platform, performance is divided into several levels, in general, can be divided into silver, gold and platinum level. You want your storage platform to have multiple levels of service without running out of resources (that is, you don't want to spend every service on the top level). Some of the stored functions like automatic layering (the array reads data from disk frequently, or vice versa), computer high-speed buffering processing (the front of the high-speed buffer memory bar), can meet at low consumption to achieve high performance. In addition, features such as data de-duplication, replication, and snapshots are also worth considering.

The most critical factor is manageability, which plays an important role in the overall cost of storage deployment platforms. For a private cloud, you must want a system that can be managed and tested simultaneously by local tools and the automated/organizational platform of your choice. The more open the storage management platform is, the more powerful the application interface or software partner ecosystem is, and the more convenient it will be for you to use it.

When you make a decision, you must make sure that the software you choose for your Automation/organization platform is well adapted to your storage platform. These tools are often used and expensive, and it is important that they have little restriction on your choice of hardware.

In short, the choice of storage platforms is complex and important for a private cloud. Even if you're only considering virtualization now, you need to think carefully about your options for future storage platforms to evolve in the cloud. For a similar storage deployment platform, you can verify your concept where possible and listen to the customer's response, because everything is fine on the slide.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)