Discussion on the choice of cloud storage solution architecture

For a private cloud or a public cloud, cloud storage is an important part of the cloud computing infrastructure. An excellent cloud storage solution architecture helps users achieve efficient, rational, and automated use of storage resources and is a major indicator of the success of the cloud computing infrastructure. But in today's age of information inflation, the volume and complexity of data is greater than ever before. Therefore, in the face of increasingly complex data environments, building a highly efficient, scalable and flexible cloud storage solution is essential for the building of a user's IT infrastructure.

Data complexity brings architectural change

In addition to structured data such as traditional databases, unstructured data, such as e-mail messages, documents, pictures, audio, and video, is currently exploding, as well as backup and archive data with unstructured and structured data. The reason for this is the increasingly rich and complex applications of users, especially in the context of cloud computing, where traditional storage architectures have proven unable to host users ' data fusion and complexity.

Figure I: IDC's forecast of global data growth. You can see from the diagram that structured data is growing slowly (the yellow part of the picture), but unstructured data (the green part of the figure) is growing rapidly and is becoming more and more significant.

In fact, the business in every industry is changing dramatically today, and it really requires users to re-examine whether the IT infrastructure meets the needs of the enterprise. In the medical industry, for example, the isolated islands of information in the past have become powerless under the general trend of regional health and medical reform, and the combination of unstructured and structured data in electronic medical records means becoming the new primary data for the medical profession, CT, b The rapid growth of super image data brings about the transmission and preservation problems, and so on, medical institutions need to have a transformative storage architecture. For example, the media industry, it is a typical private cloud environment, there are a large number of small capacity, high concurrency, high growth of multimedia data, user performance and capacity requirements are very high, the traditional storage architecture has been unable to meet this business needs.

Application Mode determines the schema

It says that the increasingly complex applications of all walks of life bring about a revolution in cloud storage architecture. For users, you need to understand the performance and capacity requirements of each application for storage. For example, Intel advocates the architecture of cloud storage based on the different application patterns of each user.

Figure II: The application pattern determines the cloud storage solution architecture. The user decides which storage to use according to the actual situation of the application. For example, applications such as enterprise data (OLTP, OLAP) and content distribution networks (CDN), which are relatively small in size but require high response speed, need to deploy high-performance storage in the cloud storage architecture; for Hadoop, Pnfs and other analytical and computational applications, Intel believes that a converged storage server can meet the dual requirements of these applications in terms of computation and capacity, and for these high-volume sequential read and write applications, such as backup and archiving, the demand can be met by mass storage.

Therefore, the cloud storage solution is actually the user's demand for storage resource utilization efficiency, users in the choice of cloud storage solution, need to consider the current situation of their own application and future application development trends, combined with these situations, for different applications to choose a reasonable cloud storage solution. Users can not ignore a trend is: the integration of server and storage, in the convergence of the trend, after the integration of the storage server to take into account both the characteristics of the future must be in the cloud storage architecture solution to assume more responsibility.

The cloud storage solution architecture provided by industry storage vendors now fully reflects these trends, such as the Atmos cloud storage solution architecture for Storage Leadership EMC Inc., a typical user of the US at&t,at& T select the Atmos architecture to provide a pay-as-you-go hosting service for users. 50% of the users currently choosing the solution are cloud service providers and 20% are media users.

Figure III, EMC Atmos cloud storage architecture is a typical cloud storage solution based on application patterns, deploying different storage for no applications, and leveraging the benefits of storage and server convergence. In addition, EMC has chosen to work closely with Intel in the cloud storage solution platform to accelerate server-storage integration with Intel Xeon processors and leverage Intel's energy management tools to reduce the energy consumption of this cloud storage platform.

The EMC Atmos cloud storage architecture platform, widely deployed in major cloud service providers around the world, actually represents the mainstream trend of current cloud storage platforms, using the features of good openness, scalability and high performance of the X86 platform, coupled with the gradual integration of servers and storage, Deploy applications on top of a converged, layered cloud storage architecture to achieve the best balance of performance and capacity, and truly give users a sense of the benefits of a cloud storage architecture.

Summary: As cloud computing grows in popularity, we find an open, integrated IT infrastructure that allows users to really take full advantage of the various IT resources, and the current cloud storage architecture solution is a microcosm of the trend response to cloud computing.