Hybrid Cloud: A pioneer in cloud deployment

Fuelled by recent announcements from VMware and other big manufacturers, the hybrid cloud has become increasingly appealing to the public. The hybrid cloud integrates the public external cloud and the internal private "cloud" (which is now equivalent to the traditional internal IT environment) into more functional solutions. The "secret" of mixed clouds is the technology of connecting in the middle. To more efficiently connect the computing and storage environments of external clouds and internal clouds, hybrid cloud solutions need to provide enterprise-class security, manageability across cloud platforms, portability of load/data, and interoperability.

The hybrid cloud has a number of compelling advantages, and we think it will ultimately bring the "game over" of cloud deployment strategies for various organizations. As the market is still in the process of development, major hardware and software vendors are constantly trying to mix the cloud into the market. Interestingly, the hybrid cloud model may further extend to the data storage market, where vendors have built and released some similar hybrid cloud storage offerings.

Most cloud storage use cases are currently designed to increase the existing storage practices in corporate data centers, some of which extend from private cloud to public cloud. The first wave of products simply focuses on overcoming problems that cannot be solved without clouds. The most widely used solution to date is building a gateway based backup and recovery, archiving, and disaster recovery (DR). Other emerging use cases include primary and near-line storage with cloud enabled, and storage configurations that use the cloud to increase the scalability, availability, and performance of your applications.

Let's look at VMware's backup and recovery use cases. The biggest pain for VMware administrators now is backup. Typical VMware consolidation ratios are 6 to 10 virtual machines per host, and virtual server administrators must choose a backup method that can successfully protect each virtual machine without impacting application performance. To address this problem, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMB) have turned to VMware data Recovery (VDR), a software that efficiently backs up virtual machine images to disk in a heavy way, and only needs to update the changed data at a block level based on the last backup.

Simplifying VMware Backup with VDR is a great first step, but what happens when there is a prolonged outage or disaster? Most SMEs cannot afford to build and maintain a remote physical disaster recovery center, most likely using cloud technology.

Twinstrata Co., Ltd's Cloudarray is a block based cloud storage gateway with built-in iSCSI interfaces that can also be used for VMware vsphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, or Citrix XenServer packaged into a physical or virtual device. The VMware data recovery sends the heavy backup data to the Cloudarray device and then stores it on the virtual volume of its streamlined provisioning. Data is written to the Cloudarray cache (based on the cache configuration per volume level) and replicated to the cloud storage. Secure data through local storage and encryption in transit. Cloudarray supports all major public or private clouds.

In the case of prolonged power outages, frequently accessed data can be recovered from the cache immediately, whether from the virtual machine or at the file level, while the data stored in the cloud is replicated back to the Cloudarray device. Data recovered from the cloud can be automated and carefully organized by VMware vcenter Site Recovery Manager. This approach provides fast data recovery without having to burden a remote site. If you are using tape for data archiving, this approach may even be more economical because you no longer need to pay for tape maintenance.

Riverbed Company uses its whitewater device to provide a similar cloud storage gateway solution, but it is file-based, not iSCSI based. Whitewater provides its popular backup application as a CIFS or NFS disk. With 2TB to 8TB of disk space, whitewater can buffer the most recently backed up data locally for quick recovery. The device leverages the advantages of riverbed in the area of WAN acceleration technology and built-in heavy technology to replicate data to a common storage cloud, such as Amazon S3, At&t Synaptic Storage as a Service (based on EMC's Atmos) or Nirvanix Cloud Storage receptacle. Like the Twinstrata company's products, the cloud does not require any hardware, and data is fully encrypted whether it is stored or transmitted.

According to the Whitewater concept of Twinstrata's Cloudarray and riverbed, the cloud has become another tier of storage that can provide backup and recovery, archiving, or comprehensive disaster-recovery protection. These innovative products take advantage of the biggest benefits of cloud storage: the economics of paying by usage, with scalability and flexibility.

Let's look at another completely different cloud storage use case, focusing on improving Microsoft's SharePoint scalability, availability, and performance. SharePoint is widely used for businesses of all sizes, but there are some architectural limitations that make it difficult to effectively overwrite more data and more users. In particular, inefficient storage objects in Microsoft's SQL Server database tables can cause performance and data protection problems, as well as the deployment of highly available (HA) and disaster recovery solutions.

The SharePoint Database Optimizer products of Storsimple Co., Ltd. can address these issues. The product consists of a storsimple device and a framework plug-in that Microsoft uses for SharePoint servers. It does not store file objects (BLOBs) in SQL Server, which reduces efficiency and increases capacity requirements and costs, and SharePoint Database Optimizer first resets and compresses file objects, then uses the EBS or RBS blob interface, Store these objects in a public cloud or private cloud in encrypted form. The size of the database is reduced by 95%, allowing the BLOB volume to take advantage of cloud economics.

On the other hand, Storsimple devices initially store SharePoint metadata database volumes in a built-in SSD (SSD), using the weighted Storage Layout (WSL) mechanism to automatically tier content based on usage patterns, Migrate infrequently accessed meta data volumes to the cloud.

The storsimple SharePoint approach has many benefits, including a significant increase in scalability and performance, more efficient utilization of storage capacity, and reduced overall costs. By separating the metadata from the file object, which simplifies storage, storsimple accelerates the backup process and has more economical high-availability and disaster-tolerant protection.

We believe that the aforementioned three products are a great demonstration of open thinking, with more and more emerging, hybrid cloud storage characteristics of products. At the same time, we look forward to a steady stream of revolutionary products Izumo storage in the coming year.

(editor: Heritage)