Hot Cloud storage Technology you know a few

Key words: Cloud storage Technology

In the current IT industry, "cloud computing" has become almost a popular element, many hardware and software manufacturers began to transfer their products to the cloud, or put forward in the cloud architecture in the direction of development. The role of "cloud storage" in the storage area is not yet clearly visible, but one thing is certain is that there are bottlenecks in both management and performance behind the rapid growth of data.

Visible, this problem arises, not only because of the high data, but also other factors such as management, a large number of duplicate data storage, low data utilization, and so on, as the cloud development of the years, when again talking about cloud storage, simply, is the use of technology will store resources reasonable, safe, Efficient application to the network to provide business development of a new solution.

"Cloud storage" has become a concern as the "cloud computing" epidemic, and unlike cloud computing's "foggy", the problem and bottleneck in data storage, whether it is in the past two years will increase the efficiency of storage management, or the more sensitive to capacity expansion of users, even cost reduction, Cloud storage has a corresponding hot storage technology to provide solutions.

For end users, the storage technology here is when there is a need, the data center must choose the relative technology to improve the mature scheme, whether the technology is early promotion, or whether the conservative dispute can be really applied to the cloud, to let technology lead innovation concept gradually formed. Perhaps this is the basis for the development of "cloud storage" technology, and innovative technologies can gradually become a viable alternative to traditional storage architectures.

In the past, increasing storage management efficiency has become the primary problem for many companies, automated tiered storage as the most effective base technology, which refers to the ability to migrate blocks of data between different disk types and RAID levels, which can meet the appropriate balance between performance and space use, Quickly put the data in the right place and avoid the so-called hot spots.

As the technology receives widespread attention, mobile data is still largely dependent on manual or semi-automatic processes between different tiers of storage media, such as FC disks and SATA disks. According to the survey, 54% of users migrate data either by hand or partially automated, which is a tedious amount of labor, especially when the nuances of the product include: different granularity of migration of data between tiers, degree of automation, and differences in user-definable policies.

As early as 09, for example, EMC launched fast (fully automated tiered storage) technology that supports storage systems such as high-end Symmetrix V-max, midrange CLARiiON, and Celerra Nas. Symmetrix supports the move of blocks of less than 1MB, CLARiiON supports a block size of 1GB, while Celerra systems implement data layering movement at the file level. From the performance of product application technology is not difficult to see, for the size of the data block to achieve fast technology.

Although automated tiered storage is in the development phase, it becomes a basic requirement by automating the streamlining of configuration technologies, especially for server virtualization environments. You can see that the automatic tiered storage technology is not the same as the market demand for data changes, and it becomes a universal requirement.

In the fast-growing market environment of cloud computing, the rampant growth of unstructured data exposes the limitations of traditional NAS systems, and Nas, with scale-out capabilities, is more attractive to businesses in capacity and performance scalability to cope with the need for large amounts of unstructured data storage, Because the use of horizontal scaling will affect the future vertical expansion of the procurement. 64% of businesses say they will replace some longitudinal (scale-up) systems with a horizontal (Scale-out) extension system.

Scale-out NAS features prominent, modular structure, very fast configuration, even a few terabytes of large files, its change management is very simple. Scale-out NAS through the global namespace, can realize the flexible management of the system, manage a cluster storage system with 100 nodes and manage a storage system with only two nodes as simple. For scalable clustered NAS systems, the entire cluster can be managed as a single logical system, regardless of the size of the cluster.

Typically, Scale-out NAS can be deployed from the lowest configuration of two nodes. As user requirements for capacity and performance are scaled up, Scale-out NAS enables simultaneous expansion of storage capacity and disk drives. This means that the user can implement on-demand configuration, thereby reducing the cost of the initial purchase.

In addition, the growing data is the biggest driver of horizontal storage application growth. According to market statistics, about 54% per cent of the users said that their enterprise data had increased the use of a more horizontal storage structure, while 1/3 of the program participants indicated that the architecture would be adopted in advance. Other considerations, such as performance, scalability, increased demand for hardware utilization, and lower operating costs, are considered by current users as driving forces for scale-out storage platform applications.

With the rise of cluster NAS vendors represented by EMC's acquisition of Isilon, the benefits of NAS Scale-out (Scale out) have been talked about by industry users. The Scale-out architecture is cheaper in terms of infrastructure cost and operational costs than the traditional storage vertical expansion (Scale up) approach. To put it simply, scaling the architecture horizontally leads to higher operational efficiencies.

Examples include HP StorageWorks X9000 storage Systems, IBM SONAS (Scale out receptacle checkmark Storage), and Isilon S-series and X-series Scale-out storage platforms, With NetApp's data Ontap 8 operating system, Meshvault has become the market's leading scale-out NAS product.

It can be seen that Meshvault cloud storage will be one of the most important storage hotspots in the 2011.

Cloud computing is also an unavoidable topic for chip giants Intel, and in the storage arena, it's about how to deal with "cloud storage" in Intel's eyes in terms of its products, technology and innovative applications to better integrate the industry's trends.

The next-generation raid and SAS technology based on the IA architecture is built on the next generation of Intel server platform ROMLEY-EP, including the SANDYBRIDGE-EP server processor and Patsburg chipset, Intel integrates RAID acceleration in the processor chip The SAS interface is integrated on the Patsburg chipset with SAS capability to support 8-port SAS connections and can be configured to two X4 ports.

For this technology, it is understood that the SAS features of Romley include the 6GB/S SAS interface, compatible with the current SAS 2.1 specifications, the longest can provide 10 meters of transmission cables, support external expansion of the disk cabinet, while meeting the requirements of the T10 SAS specifications. Thus, based on the platform manufacturer's capability to include CPU, chipset, native SAS, and raid capabilities, although the industry has different voices, Intel believes that the Romley platform can also achieve higher performance, providing a high-performance server-oriented usage model, Supports extended configuration of hard drives based on SATA and SAS interfaces.

In the area of cloud storage, SAS or SATA JBOD are supported through two X4 SAS ports, in addition to raid support, Patsburg Bridge SAS support RAID technology, providing RAID 0, 1, 10, and RAID5.

Visible, the Intel Next generation processor platform Romley very noteworthy features, integrated with a number of storage features: integrated 10GB Ethernet switching chip, 6GB SAS interface switching function, RAID capabilities. The Intel 8 processor's computing power improves to a certain extent and is fully capable of storage capabilities such as RAID, 10Gb Ethernet switching, and SAS switching.

Although the Romley platform is powerful enough to meet the needs of RAID, SAS switching, 10Gb Ethernet Exchange-related storage, but is still considered to be a product in the low-end storage market, supporting the 8-core high-end processor seems to have a slight "glut" of low-end markets, How to balance these requires further verification of the market.

Data deduplication is no longer a new technology, which is widely used in the field of backup, which makes it necessary for users to delete the technology of data deduplication in storage area. Why talk about data de-duplication technology, from previous manufacturers in the 2010 performance, Dell acquisition Ocarina NETWORKS,IBM Acquisition Storwize, those who are committed to providing such technology in the 2010 years of continuous investment, There is reason to believe that the technology is more potential in the 2011, especially when it starts to switch to primary storage applications.

In the main storage data application, data reduction has become the focus of major manufacturers, at present, users of various data reduction technology is not very understanding of the difference, it may be unclear data reduction technology used in the primary storage or backup system in the end what is different, in different data environment, the effect of the weight and compression are also differences, In some cases it can even be mixed.

For compression technology is mainly to reduce the size of the data, and the data de-duplication technology is to delete redundant data slices. The difference in effect is also obvious. The De-duplication technology is ideal for backup applications, such as saving the same data every time, and data de-duplication will have a very significant effect. In addition, the technology not only reduces the storage space demand, but also reduces the data center energy cost. As product technology is further marketed, the technology is configured for users who have a backup and recovery solution in common.

From the vendor performance perspective, in addition to the previous mention of Dell and IBM through acquisitions to enhance the strength in this area, Meshvault is a dynamic block size, global data de-duplication technology, EMC on the end of the storage System CLARiiON added block-level compression capabilities, HP expands the range of Storeonce software applications, starting with Scale-out NAS products X9000, extending from backup applications to primary storage.

EMC-led storage vendors are taking pains to lay out data-de-duplication technology. After successful bidding, the data domain global de-duplication array is based on the new data Domain architecture multi-controller extension to provide the global data De-duplication and global namespace in a dual-controller system.

According to the analysis, the data de-duplication technology has the new development in the future, in which the real-time data is heavy request, requests to complete eliminates the duplicate data directly in the writing process. In addition, versatility is required to enable archiving and data backup in the same data de-duplication device, as well as data offsite disaster recovery, providing versatile interface capabilities, and providing more powerful processing power.

In the future, data de-duplication will gradually become the embedded standard technology of various vendors, so that all kinds of systems can be applied to data de-duplication to reduce the overall cost of ownership to improve the efficiency of the system.