IBM SmartCloud Storage Access solution overview
More and more enterprises are changing their traditional IT infrastructure to a cloud computing infrastructure. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) gives the following definition of cloud computing:
Cloud Computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
In a cloud environment, users interact with cloud computing environments by using the services that the cloud environment provides. The services can include virtual machines (VMs), database services, or storage. This chapter focuses on a cloud computing environment that provides storage as a service, and provides information about some IBM offerings that can be used to create storage cloud.
1.1 Factors driving IT and businesses to cloud computing
Cloud computing has clearly moved beyond the hype and into the mainstream reality of today’s IT environments. What are the drivers for this rapid adoption and disruption in the traditional IT world? In the past few years, this question has been thoroughly studied and documented from numerous sources. One well-known example is the December, 2012 KPMG Consulting report, “The Cloud Service Providers Survey”, in which the following reasons for cloud adoption (shown in Figure 1-1) were derived.
Figure 1-1 Reasons to use cloud environments are business reasons
As you can see, although cost savings are obviously important, what is even more noteworthy is the number of business-related, time-to-market, competitive advantage, business revenue-related aspects of the move to the cloud. In aggregate, these business reasons are at least as important, if not more so, than the cost reduction reasons. For additional insight into the data behind what is driving cloud decisions, see the full report:
1.2 Cloud-enabled data center journey
Given these reasons, what does an industry preferred practices cloud look like? Also, where is storage cloud positioned in this overall cloud infrastructure? IBM has published two IBM Redpapers™ about the cloud that answer these important questions in detail:
•IBM SmartCloud: Building a Cloud Enabled Data Center, REDP-4893
•IBM SmartCloud: Becoming a Cloud Service Provider, REDP-4912
A summary of the journey to a cloud data center, extracted from the first of the previous Redpapers, is shown in Figure 1-2.
Figure 1-2 The cloud-enabled data center journey
Figure 1-2 shows the preferred practices steps that successful cloud deployments have followed.
However, note that the specific relationship patterns and workflows that the successful cloud must implement are not depicted in this progression. The next section summarizes those workflows, so that you can see exactly which preferred practices and organizational structures are required to provide true cloud services. You will also learn where storage cloud is positioned in the overall cloud.
1.2.1 Cloud workflow macro patterns
The IBM SmartCloud: Building a Cloud Enabled Data Center, REDP-4893 publication shows the overall cloud preferred practices macro-patterns and workflows of a cloud data center infrastructure (Figure 1-3).
Figure 1-3 Cloud preferred practices workflow macro-patterns
Figure 1-3 brings the cloud journey into focus, and it organizes the cloud journey shown in Figure 1-2 on page 3 into the necessary workflows and relationship macro-patterns that must exist in any successful cloud data center.
We will take these macro-patterns and go down one more level, to see the micro-patterns that make up each of these macro-patterns.
1.2.2 Cloud workflow micro patterns
Figure 1-4 zooms in to show the micro-patterns that make up each of the macro-patterns in the preferred practices cloud infrastructure.
Figure 1-4 Cloud preferred practices workflow micro-patterns
This view of cloud micro-patterns provides the required level of granularity necessary to successfully understand, scope, plan, and implement a preferred practices cloud infrastructure.
This graphic offers a checklist for cloud implementation, because you can see what functions must be implemented, where they must be implemented, in what order, and in relationship to what other functions. That is a powerful set of cloud implementation knowledge.
1.2.3 Cloud IT organizational structure
The previous figures point out an essential cloud implementation success factor, which is a necessary information technology (IT) reorganization from the existing structure, realigning instead along the workflows that make up the preferred practices cloud infrastructure.
To deliver true cloud services, a traditional IT organization is unfortunately almost certainly not organized along the lines of the preferred practices cloud workflows shown in Figure 1-2 on page 3 and Figure 1-3 on page 4.
It is not surprising that a traditional IT organization finds it so difficult to deliver truly elastic modern cloud IT capabilities. Therefore, these cloud preferred practices workflows also give you an organizational template, depicting how your IT organization must be reorganized over time to deliver true cloud services.
1.2.4 Storage cloud workflow in overall cloud
The remainder of this book focuses on the storage cloud portion of the preferred practices cloud, and the role that IBM SmartCloud Storage Access plays in the cloud workflow. In the diagram shown in Figure 1-5, the key IBM Storage products are positioned in the preferred practices cloud workflow.
Figure 1-5 IBM Storage Cloud product positioning in the cloud preferred practices workflow
You have seen the overall cloud big picture. Now, turn your attention to the storage-specific portions of the cloud journey.
1.3 The storage cloud journey
The journey to a storage cloud can and will start at different places for different organizations. You have seen how the storage cloud is positioned in the overall cloud infrastructure.
The following sections focus on the storage-specific portions of the cloud journey, describing an effective path to transition from a traditional IT storage infrastructure to a cloud-based storage infrastructure. Figure 1-6 shows the typical journey from a traditional model to a cloud-based model.
Figure 1-6 The transition from traditional IT to storage cloud
Storage cloud offers a path to IT optimization by implementing key practices, such as virtualization, standardization, and automation. An optimized storage infrastructure aligns IT resources to business requirements through managed service levels. These service levels are usually defined in a service catalog, which is supported in storage cloud implementation.
Traditional IT
Evaluate the current IT infrastructure (servers, storage, networking, and so on) and identify where servers and storage can be consolidated for better performance, usage, and operational efficiency.
Consolidate
Consolidate inventory storage capacity by location, identifying opportunities to combine capacity where feasible to drive inherent economies of scale and usage improvement.
Virtualize
Virtualize storage capacity for better usage and performance.
Optimize
Optimize to align business requirements with cost-effective infrastructure through service-level management. Tiering, archiving, and space reclamation are key practices in achieving an optimized storage infrastructure.
Automate
Automate storage administrative processes, such as the movement of data, using policies across different storage tiers, thereby enabling faster access to the most frequently used data, and also ensuring that the correct data is stored in the correct place.
Shared resources
After consolidating and virtualizing the storage resources, the infrastructure is ready to be shared across the global enterprise.
Cloud-ready
Although all of these practices are not absolutely mandatory, they are all instrumental for deploying an optimized infrastructure in a storage cloud implementation for your enterprise. Consolidation of servers and storage with virtualization technologies improves usage, and standardizing infrastructure and processes improves operational efficiency.
Automation facilitates flexible delivery and enables client self-service. Establishing common workloads on shared resources enables clients to provision new workloads in a dynamic fashion to achieve a true cloud-enabled environment.
IBM offers a comprehensive set of solutions geared toward enabling a cloud infrastructure for clients, from small and medium-sized businesses to global enterprises. This book introduces IBM SmartCloud Storage Access, a storage service cloud delivery offering to build storage clouds with IBM storage subsystems and software.
For more information about storage cloud, see the IBM Smart Storage Cloud, REDP-4873 Redbooks publication, which can be found on the following website:
1.4 Building the storage cloud
Now that you have seen what the overall storage cloud journey looks like, the next sections provide a detailed description of the storage cloud and compare it to traditional storage. We will investigate in more detail the purpose of storage cloud and the benefits it can bring. A general guide is also provided to explain how to transform a current (traditional) storage environment into a storage cloud.
1.4.1 Storage cloud introduction
A storage cloud can be part of an overall cloud data center, or can provide storage as a service to storage users. It can be delivered in any of the cloud delivery models (public, private, hybrid, or community). A storage cloud can be used to support a diverse range of storage needs, including mass data stores, file shares, backup, archive, and more.
Implementations range from public user data stores to large private storage area networks (SANs) or network-attached storage (NAS) hosted in-house or at third-party managed facilities. The following list includes some examples of publicly available storage clouds:
•The IBM SmartCloud solution, which offers various storage options, including archive, backup, and object storage.
•Microsoft OneDrive, which can be used to store and share files on the Microsoft public storage cloud service.
•Email services such as Hotmail, Gmail, and Yahoo. These services store users’ email and attachments in their respective storage clouds.
•Facebook and YouTube, which allow users to store and share photos and videos.
Storage cloud capability can also be offered in the form of storage as a service, where fees are paid based on the amount of storage space that is used. There are various ways a storage cloud can be used, based on your organization's specific requirements.
Figure 1-7 shows how various electronic or portable devices can access storage through the Internet without requiring the explicit details of the type or location of storage that is used. Although these devices can access SAN or NAS storage, the SAN or NAS storage can also use storage clouds for backup or other purposes.
Figure 1-7 Overview of a storage cloud
In a cloud infrastructure, a useful distinction can be made about how storage capacity is used, similar to the difference that exists in traditional IT between system data (files, libraries, utilities, and so on) and application data and user files. This distinction becomes important for storage allocation in virtual server implementations.
Storage cloud
Storage cloud is the storage capacity service that is provided for client data and the primary focus of this document. A storage cloud exhibits the characteristics essential to any cloud service (self-service provisioning, Internet and intranet accessibility, pooled resources, elastic, and metered).
In this cloud environment, the offered services provide the ability to store and retrieve data on behalf of computing processes that are not part of the storage cloud service. A storage cloud can be used in combination with a compute cloud, as a private compute facility, or as storage for a computing device.
Storage for cloud
Storage for cloud is a general name that is applied to the type of storage environment that is implemented in cloud computing to provision cloud-computing services. For example, when a virtual server machine is created, some storage capacity is required. This storage is provisioned as part of the VM creation process, to support the operating system and runtime environment for the instance. It is not delivered by a storage cloud. However, it can be provisioned from the same storage infrastructure as a storage cloud.
1.4.2 Challenges of traditional storage
Storage cloud implementations can be used to overcome challenges that are posed by other IT infrastructures. This section provides a high-level categorization of the limitations of other IT infrastructures. Challenges in one category might sometimes apply to other categories.
Constrained business agility
The time that is required to provision storage capacity for new projects or unexpectedly rapid growth affects an organization's ability to quickly react to changing business conditions. This situation can often negatively affect the ability to develop and deliver products and services with competitive time-to-market targets. Consider the following constraints:
•Time that is required to deploy new or upgraded business functions
•Downtime that is required for data migration and technology refresh
•Unplanned storage capacity acquisitions
•Staffing limitations
Substantial reserve capacity is often required to support growth, which requires planning and investment far in advance of a requirement to store data. To ensure that additional capacity can be rapidly added to the infrastructure, it must be possible to add resources quickly. When resources cannot be added, it can be difficult to cope with rapidly changing business environments. This adversely affects the ability to make fast decisions and proactively optimize processes with predictable outcomes.
Additional constraints include requirements to meet demand for data availability, and to access the correct data at the correct time to make better business decisions. The inability to support unplanned acquisitions and staffing limitations can also affect business agility.
Suboptimal usage of IT resources
The variation in workloads, and the difficulty in determining future requirements, typically causes IT storage capacity inefficiencies:
•Difficulty predicting future capacity and service level needs
•Peaks and valleys in resource requirements
•Over-provisioning and under‑provisioning IT resources
Extensive capacity planning effort is needed to plan for varying future storage capacity and service level requirements. Capacity is often underutilized when a storage infrastructure requires reserve capacity for unpredictable future growth requirements, and therefore cannot be easily scaled up or down. Compounding these issues is the frequent inability to seamlessly provision additional storage capacity without impacting application uptime.
Organizational constraints
Artificial resource acquisition, ownership, and operational practices can be a barrier to the efficient use of resources:
•Project-oriented infrastructure funding
•Constrained operational budgets
•Difficulty implementing resource sharing
•No chargeback or showback mechanism as incentive for IT resource conservation
The limited ability to share data across the enterprise, especially in the context of interdepartmental sharing, can degrade overall usage of IT resources, including storage capacity. Parallel performance requirements in existing storage systems result in one node supporting one disk, leading to multiplication of nodes and servers.
IT resource management
Efficient IT support is based on cost-effective infrastructure and service level management to address business needs:
•Rapid capacity growth
•Cost control
•Service‑level monitoring and support (performance, availability, capacity, security, retention, and so on)
•Architectural open standardization
The continued growth of resource management complexity in the storage infrastructure is often based on a lack of standardization, and on high levels of configuration customization. For example, storage performance can be adjusted through multiple Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) settings, and manually tuning the distribution of I/O loads across various storage arrays uses valuable staff resources.
Storage resource management can be complicated by a requirement to avoid vendor lock-in due to proprietary protocols for data access. Other challenges are related to managing and meeting stringent service level agreement (SLA) requirements, and a lack of in-house expertise to manage complex storage infrastructures. New service levels, adjusting existing SLAs to align IT disaster recovery to business resilience requirements, and high availability (HA) solutions are also factors.
Duplicate data that exists in the form of copies across organizational islands in the enterprise leads to higher costs for data storage and backup infrastructure. Compounding all of these factors are ever-shrinking operational and project budgets, and a lack of dynamic chargeback or showback models as incentive for IT resource conservation.
1.4.3 Advantages and features of storage cloud
The storage cloud model can be helpful for businesses that have seasonal or unpredictable capacity requirements, and for businesses that require rapid deployment or contraction of storage capacity. When storage cloud is used, clients can focus on their core business, and worry less about supporting a storage infrastructure for their data. Storage cloud provides the following advantages:
•Facilitates rapid capacity provisioning, supporting business agility
•Improves storage usage by avoiding unused capacity
•Provides support for storage consolidation and storage virtualization functionality
•Gives chargeback and showback accounting for usage as an incentive to conserve resources
Storage cloud helps companies to become more flexible and agile, and supports their growth. Improvement in quality of service (QoS), achieved by automating provisioning and management of underlying complex storage infrastructure, helps improve the overall efficiency of IT storage. Cloud features, such as deduplication, compression, automatic tiering, and data migration capabilities, are generally built-in options in addition to support for optimizing storage costs by implementing tiered storage.
Often, the growth in file-based systems is restricted to around a few terabytes (TB). This restriction can be easily overcome with storage cloud. Ubiquitous access to data over the Internet, intranet, or both, provides location-independent access, and can provide a single management platform to manage hundreds of nodes, with data flowing from all of the nodes to all of the storage arrays.
Capital expenditure can be reduced with a cloud operational-based, pay-as-you-go model. Storage clouds can be tailored, and services can be acquired, to support key storage operations, such as backup and recovery, remote site disaster recovery, archive, or development and test operations.
Figure 1-8 shows the layers that provide unique benefits in the storage cloud.
Figure 1-8 Storage cloud characteristics
The overall benefits of storage cloud vary significantly based on the underlying storage infrastructure. Storage cloud can help businesses achieve more effective functionality at lower cost, while improving business agility and reducing project scheduling risk.
Figure 1-9 identifies basic differences between the traditional IT model and a storage cloud-based model.
Figure 1-9 Benefits of moving to storage cloud from a traditional IT infrastructure
Dynamic scaling and provisioning (elasticity)
One of the key advantages of storage cloud is dynamic scaling, which is also known as elasticity. Elasticity means that storage resources can be dynamically allocated (scaled up) or released (scaled down) based on business needs. Traditional IT storage infrastructure administration most often acquires the capacity that is needed in the next year or two, which means that this reserve capacity is idle or underutilized for some period of time.
A storage cloud can start small and grow incrementally with business requirements, or shrink to lower costs if appropriate to capacity demands. This scaling is a key reason that storage cloud can support a company's growth while reducing net capital investment in storage.
Faster deployment of storage resources
New enterprise storage resources can often be provisioned and deployed in minutes. In other, less optimized IT structures, this process typically takes more time, sometimes days or even months. Faster deployment can lead to a reduction in total cost of ownership (TCO) and better return on investment (ROI).
Enterprise storage virtualization and consolidation can significantly lower infrastructure TCO. Centralized storage capacity and management can be used to improve usage and efficiency, generally providing a higher ROI through storage capacity cost avoidance. In addition, savings can be gained because of reductions in floor space, the amount of energy required for cooling, and labor costs for support and maintenance. This improved ROI can be important when storage costs grow faster than revenues and directly affect profitability.
Reduced cost of managing storage
Virtualization helps in consolidating storage capacity and helps achieve much higher usage, which can reduce your capital expenditure on storage and its management.
Greener data centers
When geographically dispersed storage is consolidated into fewer data centers, a smaller rackspace can be achieved. TCO and ROI can be improved because of reduced requirements for energy (electrical power) and infrastructure space.
Multi-user file sharing
When storage infrastructure is centralized, all users can have parallel and simultaneous access to all of the data across the enterprise, rather than dealing with isolated islands of data. This centralization also helps in collaboration and file sharing with higher data access rates.
Self-service user portal
A self-service user portal that is based on a service catalog enables clients to automatically provision based on predefined templates. This portal can be used to manage IT infrastructure based on the user’s needs.
Integrated storage and service management
The storage cloud infrastructure usually includes integrated management software. This software can be used to help manage the complete storage infrastructure from a single console, without having to buy proprietary management software from multiple vendors. This method can save time and help reduce spending on various proprietary management software.
Improved efficiency of data management
Consolidation and standardization of storage resources facilitates less infrastructure complexity, which simplifies storage management. Consistent policies and process with integrated management tools support geographically diverse infrastructure requirements that are driven by performance or availability considerations.
Faster time to market
Automation, self-service portals, rapid deployment, dynamic scaling, and centralized storage management enhance business agility by facilitating significant improvements, such as decreased time-to-market for new products. Businesses can focus on building their core products and competencies rather than worrying about the management of their IT infrastructure.
1.4.4 General steps to build a storage cloud
This section explains the general steps to follow to transform current traditional storage environments to a storage cloud. IT managers can follow the methodology described in Figure 1-10.
Figure 1-10 Storage cloud methodology
Follow these steps to build a storage cloud:
1. Virtualization: Build a resource pool
IT managers with a storage cloud architecture in mind can start the cloud construction from the storage resource virtualization stage. In traditional IT environments, storage subsystems are typically configured with a native graphical user interface (GUI) or command-line interface (CLI). Storage administrators decide how to allocate storage resources, and then implement the resources manually.
With storage virtualization, all capacity resources can be integrated into a tiered resource pool that provides a unified interface to manage resources for different storage subsystems. Normally, the storage virtualization and resource pool integration can be achieved with SAN virtualization or NAS gateway solutions.
2. Monitoring: Monitor the virtual environment and design process
After all of the storage resources are consolidated and virtualized, the IT manager must pay attention to the usage and performance of those storage resources. This can be achieved by deploying a monitoring tool that will be able to work with all of the storage subsystems in the virtual environment. With the monitoring, the IT staff will clearly understand the storage topology, including the mapping relationships between the virtual and real storage resources, or between the NAS and underlying SAN capacities.
They will also see the performance metrics of the storage resources. Based on the monitoring results, the IT manager and team can design and propose a storage resource allocation process to follow. This process enables the requests from different departments, or different applications to be fulfilled with different levels (or tiers) of storage resources.
3. Standardization and automation: Set SLA and deploy the automation tools
Based on the storage monitoring results and resource process control, the IT manager can design for the SLA to meet the storage resource requirements for the cloud environment. The service levels can be defined based on the following attributes:
•Storage performance capability, such as solid-state drive (SSD), Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA), and so on
•Access protocols, such as Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP), Network File System (NFS), and so on
•Different monitoring levels
•Different information lifecycle management (ILM) or data protection levels
With the SLAs defined, the storage resources can be categorized, and the storage requirements are more easily estimated. It is also important that the storage cloud providers can charge the users according to the SLA and the amount of storage used.
At the same time, deploy automation mechanisms in the storage environment to better manage the storage capacity, integration backup, or data migration. Some automation configurations also influence the SLA settings.
4. Service portal: Implement a service portal to manage resources and requests
After SLAs and automation tools are prepared, the IT manager can implement a service portal to manage all of the storage resources, and the requests to manage the storage cloud. From the cloud service portal, cloud users can submit requests and administrators can approve or reject them.
Storage cloud resources can also be easily altered or removed from this portal. Moreover, administrators can monitor the whole storage cloud environment. They are notified of events, and they can also troubleshoot problems in the cloud, with the help of the portal. The portal must work tightly with the provisioning, monitoring, and automation tools.
After the service portal is deployed, all users request or manage the storage resources through the portal. Based on the standards and rules, the portal monitors and manages the storage resources through tools or utilities. Human intervention and manual tasks are minimized. This configuration is the basic form of storage cloud.
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