Storage technology in cloud computing era--cloud storage

Cloud computing Concept

Cloud is actually a metaphor of the internet and the Internet. In the past, the cloud was used to represent the telecommunications network, which was later used to represent the abstraction of the Internet and underlying infrastructure. Cloud computing is divided into narrow cloud computing and broad cloud computing. Narrow cloud computing refers to the delivery and usage patterns of IT infrastructure, which means acquiring the required resources through the network on an as-needed and extensible basis; broad cloud computing refers to the delivery and usage patterns of services, which means that the required services are obtained through the network in an on-demand, extensible manner. If only the next definition, people still can't understand what is cloud computing, we give a very obvious example. In traditional mode, enterprises to build a set of IT systems not only need to buy hardware and other infrastructure, as well as the license to buy software, need special personnel maintenance. As the scale of the enterprise expands, it will continue to upgrade various hardware and software facilities to meet the needs. For enterprises, hardware and software, such as computers, are not what they really need, they are just tools for accomplishing work and providing efficiency. For individuals, we need to install a lot of software for normal use of the computer, and many of the software is charged, which is very uneconomical for users who don't use the software very often. If we can provide all the software we need to rent, we only need to pay a small amount of "rent" can be "rented" to these software services, for us to save a lot of money to buy hardware and software. We have to use electricity every day, but we are not each of our own generators, which are centrally provided by power plants; we have to tap water every day, but we don't have wells in every house, it's provided by the waterworks. This model greatly saves resources and facilitates our life. Is it possible for us to use computer resources like water and electricity in the face of computer problems? These ideas eventually led to the creation of cloud computing. The ultimate goal of cloud computing is to make computing, services, and applications available to the public as a public facility, allowing people to use computer resources like water, electricity, gas and telephones. The cloud computing model is the centralized power supply model for power plants.

In the cloud computing mode, the user's computer becomes very simple, perhaps small memory, no hard disk and a variety of applications to meet our needs, because the user's computer in addition to the "cloud" through the browser to send instructions and accept data is basically nothing to do can use the cloud service provider's computing resources, Storage space and various application software. This is like connecting "monitor" and "host" wires infinitely long, so you can put the monitor in front of the user, and the host is far away from even the computer users themselves do not know where. Cloud computing connects "monitor" and "host" wires into networks, turning "hosts" into server clusters for cloud service providers. In a cloud computing environment, user perceptions can change radically: from "buy a product" to "buy a service", because they are not directly facing the complex hardware and software, but the ultimate service. Users do not need to have visible, touch hardware facilities, also do not need to pay equipment for the computer room power supply, air-conditioning refrigeration, special maintenance and so on costs, and do not need to wait for a long supply cycle, project implementation, such as lengthy time, just to the money to the cloud services provider, we will immediately get the services needed. This is what cloud computing is all about, and how does it relate to cloud computing in this mode?

Cloud Storage Concepts

Cloud storage is a new concept that extends and develops in the cloud computing (cloud computing) concept, which means that a large number of different types of storage devices in the network can be assembled together through application software through cluster application, grid technology or Distributed File system. A system that provides data storage and business access functions together externally. When the core of cloud computing system operation and processing is large amount of data storage and management, cloud computing system needs to configure a large number of storage devices, then cloud computing system is transformed into a cloud storage system, so cloud storage is a data storage and management as the core cloud computing system. In short, cloud storage is a new way to put storage resources on the web for people to access. Users can easily access data at any time, anywhere, through any network-connected device. However, while convenient to use, we have to pay attention to the security of storage, storage must have good compatibility, as well as its scalability and performance aggregation and many other factors. First, security is most important as storage, especially in the cloud, where data centers store many users ' data, and the security of the storage system becomes increasingly important if the storage system has a problem that affects far more than the time of the decentralized storage. Second, the storage used in the cloud data center must be well compatible. In the cloud era, computing resources are taken to the data center, together with the supporting storage space distributed to users, so stand on the user's point of view is not need to concern about compatibility, but the point of view of the data center, compatibility is a very important issue. Many users bring a variety of requirements, Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS, storage needs to face a variety of operating systems, if it is more than enough to each operating system with dedicated storage, the spirit of cloud computing will undoubtedly run counter, so, in the cloud computing environment, The first thing to solve is compatibility issues. Again, the capacity to expand storage capacity.

Because to face a large number of users, storage systems need to store files will be exponential growth posture, which requires storage system capacity expansion to keep pace with the growth of data, to achieve unlimited expansion, while in the process of expansion of the best to do is simple, can not affect the overall operation of the data center, If capacity expansion requires complex operations, or even downtime, this will undoubtedly greatly reduce the operational efficiency of the data center. Finally, cloud-era storage systems need more than just capacity improvements, for performance requirements are also urgent, and in the past only for limited users, in the cloud era, the storage system will be for a broader user community, the increase in the number of users to make the storage system must also be in the throughput performance of a rapid upgrade, This is the only way to respond quickly to requests, this requires the storage system to have linearly increasing throughput performance as capacity increases, which is clearly not a goal that traditional storage architectures can achieve, and traditional storage systems cannot distribute all access pressures evenly across multiple storage nodes because they do not have a distributed file system. Therefore, there are obvious transmission bottlenecks between the storage system and the computing systems, which leads to a single point of failure and so on, and cluster storage is the daughter of the solution to meet the requirements of the new era.

Cloud storage technology and traditional storage technology

Traditional storage technology is to treat all data as important and equal to the enterprise, all the data integrated into a single storage system to meet business continuity requirements. But they are stretched in the face of big data problems:

1. Cost surges. In the large-scale project, the front-end image information collection point is too many, the single server load capacity is limited, causes needs to configure dozens of units, even hundreds of server's condition. This will inevitably lead to the rapid increase of construction cost, management cost, maintenance cost and energy consumption cost;

2 disk fragmentation issues. Because the video surveillance system often uses the rollback writing method, this kind of disorderly frequent reads and writes the operation, causes the disk fragment the massive production. With the increase of usage time, it will seriously affect the reading and writing performance of the whole storage system, and even cause the storage system to be locked as read-only and unable to write new video data;

3 Performance problems. Because of the proliferation of data, the indexing efficiency of data has become more and more concerned. With terabytes of data. Even hundreds of TB of data, it often takes a few minutes to index.

As the latest storage technology, cloud storage has the following benefits compared to traditional storage:

1 Management convenience. In fact, this can be summed up as a cost advantage. Since most of the data is migrated to the cloud storage, all upgrade maintenance tasks are performed by the cloud storage service provider, saving the cost pressures on the enterprise storage System administrators. There is also the strong scalability of cloud storage services, when enterprise users grow up, suddenly found that their previous storage space is insufficient, you must consider increasing the storage server to meet existing storage requirements. The cloud storage service can easily expand the service space on the original foundation and satisfy the demand;

2 Low cost. For the time being, the cost to the data storage of the enterprise is quite large, and the cost is increasing with the data exploding. To reduce this cost pressure, many companies move most of their data to cloud storage, allowing cloud storage service providers to solve their data storage problems. In this way, we can get the best data storage service with very little price.

3) Customized. This is primarily for private clouds. Cloud service providers specialize in providing a tailored cloud storage service for a single enterprise customer, or it can be an enterprise's own IT organization to deploy a private cloud service architecture. Private cloud not only can provide the highest quality personal service for enterprise users, but also can reduce the security risk to some extent.

Traditional storage mode is no longer adapted to the current problem of data explosion, how to let the emerging cloud storage to play its due capacity, in the solution of security, compatibility and so on, we still need continuous efforts, for now, the cloud computing era has come, as its core cloud storage will become the future of storage technology inevitable trend.