Cloud Computing
Solution Brief
Cloud Computing, Hype or Reality and How to Tell
With LSI Storage Technologies as part of the solution, Cloud Computing has the potential to help business
leaders and IT professionals manage costs and improve service levels.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Run a simple search. “What is Cloud Computing?”
Cloud-based storage is one method
available for meeting business needs
for IT resources. It offers IT professionals
the chance to be more agile, respond
more quickly and efficiently and manage
costs more closely, but there are risks.
It will yield thousands of whitepapers, blogs and videos, some a few short words, some
that run to great length. All of them say essentially the same thing: cloud computing is
there when you need it and not there when you don’t.
IT at the Intersection
Hype or Reality?
How is a senior decision maker to pick
the right partner from today’s cloud
storage providers? How is a
working-level IT professional to sort
through the bold marketing claims to
build and defend a recommendation their
company can rely on?
In essence, cloud computing is the intersection of business imperatives and technical
capabilities. The business realities, familiar ones,
include CAPEX and OPEX cost containment,
higher service levels from IT organisations
to their constituents inside and outside the
company, limited or shrinking staff resources,
and improved responsiveness to changing
business requirements, competitive threats or
market opportunities.
From the outside, the marketing around cloud
capabilities make it sound like the cloud can
do anything you need, instantly. It follows
then that the requirements for reliability and
performance placed on components that go
into making the cloud work as well as it needs
to are significantly higher than they would be in
traditional data centre settings. They have to be
if cloud vendors are to have any chance of living
up to their claims. For the cloud to succeed
as that flexible, responsive pool of computing
potential that can be called on when needed,
run flawlessly and be “released “ back into the
cloud when no longer needed, it has to be built
on components that perform to the highest
standards…only as strong as its weakest link,
after all.
LSI storage technologies in the cloud
storage provider’s solution is one strong
indicator that they are a leader, that
their products and services will live
up to expectations, and that your
company’s data will be available
whenever they are needed.
LSI PRODUCTS
MENTIONED IN SOLUTION:
· 6
Gb/s MegaRAID and
3ware Controllers
· SAS6160 Switch
· WarpDrive SLP-300
· MegaRAID Fast Path Software
· MegaRAID CacheCade Software
The technical capabilities of cloud computing
start with the ubiquity of the World Wide
Web. Add the pervasive availability of
powerful, multicore processor-based servers,
massive network pipes, and all-but-free hard
disk storage. Then consider virtualisation
capabilities that dissolve boundaries between
physical and logical server resources, between
physical and virtual storage resources, and
finally, include management and accounting
applications to turn on or turn off infrastructure,
platforms, software and data storage capacity,
performance and protection almost anywhere,
anytime, on demand. The result? Frictionless
access to on-demand data compute and storage
resources.
Nowhere in the cloud is this more true than
in cloud storage. A quick – cloud enabled –
search of “Cloud Storage Providers ” and “Cloud
Storage as a Service” reveals immediately that
data protection is central to the “Cloud Storage”
value proposition. Reliable access to data was
recently identified in a survey of enterprise CIOs
as one of the most important requirements
for cloud storage. Early offerings were built
From the perspective of an end
user or business executive
responsible for investigating,
vetting or selecting a cloud
storage vendor, the old expression
comes to mind, “You get what you
inspect, not what you expect.”
around providing a safe place to store working
datasets or to backup or archive your company’s
most important business information. Data
protection is still a leading requirement and
offering, but now, according to a recent IDC
survey, it is joined with business agility as a
strong reason to consider cloud storage as part
of an IT portfolio.
How to Tell
How does one begin to validate claims and come
to a sound, objective, defensible conclusion
that a cloud storage provider can deliver the
data protection, high speed access, resource
flexibility, manageability and cost containment
they promise and businesses and individuals
require?
From the perspective of an end user or business
executive responsible for investigating, vetting
or selecting a cloud storage vendor, the old
expression comes to mind, “You get what
you inspect, not what you expect.” A sound
concept, but…inspect what, verify what?
What are the critical elements of a sound cloud
computing and more specifically a cloud
storage-environment that indicate the provider
can deliver against the stated requirements?
The Big Picture
Starting with the big picture, it probably helps
if the cloud provider offers services out of a
data centre - or even better duplicate, remote
level four data centres that are not on a fault
line or in an area prone to flooding, tornados,
cyclones or hurricanes. These data centres, in
order to meet the Uptime Institute’s criteria
for level four certification also need to have
redundant HVAC systems and power grids with
separate generating sources and guaranteed
fuel supplies. These data centres must also
have physical and data security, secure access,
keyed entry, biometrics and vetted, trained
professional staff on site, 24/7. Visit www.
uptimeinstitute.org for more information
directly from the Uptime Institute.
Moving down to a more detailed level, fully
redundant hardware, servers, networks, and
storage technology, all of which is virtualised,
load balanced and configured to scale
seamlessly, on demand enable a cloud provider
to provision and deprovision in accordance
with client needs as well as scale up and scale
out as performance and capacity requirements
change. It is here, at the hardware and
software detail level, at the component level,
that responsible business leaders finally have
objective criteria to evaluate the claims of a
cloud computing or storage provider. As the
image below suggests, some cloud storage
providers may promise more than they can
deliver.
LSI storage technologies are designed to help
providers deliver the core cloud storage value
proposition of data security and line of business
requirements for cost control, scalability,
manageability and flexibility. They are built on
a foundation of 30 years’ experience delivering
leadership technologies to some of the most
important companies. They are available to
protect some of the most important data in the
world, yours. Here’s how.
1028
Code
LSI storage technologies enable leading cloud
storage providers, and750
help you separate the real
capabilities from the hype.
App Server
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Mobile
Cloud Computing
PC
Database
Kitchen Sink
Cloud Computing, Hype or Reality and How to Tell 2
Data Access Performance Has to Feel “Local”
Cloud storage offers the benefits of reliable
access to data, cost containment and flexible
asset deployment, but if data are stored
remotely, is there an impact to performance?
There are factors that affect perceived
performance all along the data path from
drive latencies to display refresh rates. LSI
MegaRAID® and 3ware® RAID controller cards
have well established reputations for delivering
some of the best performance available in the
category. If the datasets your business works
with typically come in small chunks, like online
store transactions or database enquiries, then
you will want to ask your cloud provider, or your
in-house data centre storage manager, if their
storage is based on the LSI 6Gb/s SATA+SAS
RAID controllers. These RAID controllers are
tuned to get the best from traditional SATA or
SAS hard drives.
Tiered, Tailored, Storage Technologies
If your cloud storage provider combines
MegaRAID controllers with MegaRAID
CacheCade™ software , an additional
performance boost becomes available, and now
the possibility of “tiered performance” becomes
available.
In a recent podcast, Simon Johnson, data
recovery practice lead at Glasshouse
Technologies, stated, “We’ve observed in a
number of profiles, that 90% of all stored data is
not touched during a three month period, and
beyond that, the industry figures that 70% to
80% of data in organisations is inactive or never
accessed.” Clearly the opportunity to tailor disk
performance to access patterns could yield
significant savings.
CacheCade software enables solid state
drives (SSDs) to be configured as a secondary
tier of cache to maximise transactional I/O
performance. Cloud storage providers can
add one SSD to substantially improve IOPS
performance as opposed to adding more hard
drives to an array, saving cost and enabling
another level of performance.
By utilising CacheCade software, MegaRAID
controllers allow SSDs to be used in front of
a hard disk drive (HDDs) volume creating a
high-performance controller cache, CacheCade
software allows for very large, “hot spot” data
sets to be present in cache and can deliver
significant performance improvements in readintensive applications, such as file, Web, OLTP
and database server.
Leading cloud storage providers can also have
some other LSI storage technology available to
support your business requirements. Specifically
they can have implemented MegaRAID Fast
Path software, which is designed to optimise
performance for full SSD-based volumes for
data storage.
LSI storage technologies are
designed to help providers
deliver the core cloud storage
value proposition of data security
and line of business requirements
for cost control, scalability,
manageability and flexibility.
Moving even further up the storage
performance ladder, the LSI WarpDrive™
SLP-300 is a solid state storage card, like a solid
state drive, but it fits into a PCIe® slot directly
in a server or storage appliance. Because it is
flash-based and plugs directly into a PCIe slot,
it offers high performance with low latency and
a low CPU burden. It is designed to maximise
transactional I/O performance for many cloudfriendly applications such as web serving, data
warehousing and analytics, online transaction
processing (OLTP) and high-performance
computing (HPC).
The presence of LSI 6Gb/s SATA +SAS RAID
cards, combined with advanced software
options and the WarpDrive SLP-300 card, can
be a clear indicator of leadership in cloud
storage service. These technologies are used by
sophisticated providers to help deliver tiers of
performance whether the storage devices are
traditional SATA or SAS HDDs or the emerging
Solid SSDs
Just as it makes less and less business sense to
provision IT resources ‘just in case” there might
be a spike in demand, or business needs might
change, so too is the need for access to the
highest performing-and likely most expensive
– storage assets being called into question
as the best fit for all data storage needs. “Hot
data” should have access to the fastest practical
storage assets, but data that are accessed
less frequently, or for service levels with less
stringent performance requirements, more
traditional, slower, less expensive data storage
resources might suffice.
Cloud Computing, Hype or Reality and How to Tell 3
“Then I learned of the LSI 6Gb/s
SAS switching technologies. All
the benefits of a failover SAN, with
the performance of an end-to-end
native SAS 6Gb data path, well
within our budget.”
Jeff Ello, IT Manager
Krannert School of Management
Purdue University
In addition to the performance benefits of LSI
MegaRAID controllers and advanced software,
and the application acceleration possible from
using the WarpDrive SLP-300, LSI also offers the
6Gb/s SAS6160 Switch.
University, looked at several installations in
other parts of the university and at other
leading institutions before deciding to upgrade
his LAN with new servers and SAS storage
components from LSI.
Flexibility to Scale Storage
“We needed a storage topology and technology
that could keep up with the virtual machines we
were implementing,” Ello explained.
Picture the data centre at your cloud storage
provider, many, many servers connected to
redundant pairs of 16-port LSI SAS6160 Switches
and those same SAS Switches connected to
many, many enclosures full of solid state, SATA
or SAS devices. The servers can be configured
to provide your business with the data
crunching resources you need, and the full
range of storage devices behind the SAS6160
Switch can be configured in combinations to
provide your business with the data storage
resources you need, at the performance levels
you need, when you need them.
The SAS6160 switch significantly extends
the capabilities of SAS in direct-attached
storage (DAS) environments by allowing
multiple servers to connect to one or more
independent external storage systems. The
6Gb/s SAS Switch helps provide a low-cost
and easy-to-use storage networking option for
rack-mount servers and storage installations
in cloud computing, mega data centre, smallto medium-size business, and virtual server
environments.
By enabling storage resources to be shared
across multiple hosts and managed through
SAS zoning, the SAS Switch helps maximise
storage utilization while eliminating islands of
storage. It also simplifies storage management,
backup, and upgrades. The SAS Switch is
designed from the ground up to deliver the
connectivity required to support virtual server
environments. It allows organisations to realise
the benefits of virtual machine migration while
maintaining the management simplicity of DAS.
This environment allows potential cloud storage
providers to assign resources to your needs
from a remote console with a few clicks.
In one example, Jeff Ello, IT manager at the
Krannert School of Management at Purdue
“We abandoned a complex and finicky fibre
channel configuration years ago for inexpensive,
fast direct attached storage systems,” Ello said.
“Virtualising storage-intensive servers without
major performance losses requires a level of
storage performance that SANs have so far been
unable to achieve. 10Gb iSCSI seemed like the
obvious choice, but cost was a big deterrent.
Then I learned of the LSI 6Gb/s SAS switching
technologies. All the benefits of a failover SAN,
with the performance of an end-to-end native
SAS 6Gb data path, well within our budget. It
seemed too good to be true, but that’s exactly
what we got.”
Cloud storage providers also have the
opportunity to build the same performance and
flexibility into resources available to you.
Business Changes
Imagine that you are in a meeting on a new
business initiative. Tremendous new data sets
will be generated and required service levels
will be high. You send a text to your leading
cloud storage provider requesting 30 terabytes
of additional storage with the maximum
available data protections applied, and it must
be available ASAP… “Done” says the reply text
a few seconds later. That’s how it could work
when your cloud resource provider relies on LSI.
Peak Shaving
In another scenario, it is determined that web
traffic to your sites is unevenly distributed over
the course of a day. With the agility to scale
cloud-based storage up and down, from hour to
hour, you only pay for peak resources required
to maintain service targets when you need
them. Releasing those resources between peak
usage periods can result in significant savings.
Cloud Computing, Hype or Reality and How to Tell 4
IT Workload and Costs
Peak Application Demand Supplied
in the Cloud for Agility and Savings
Savings
Realised by using
flexible, on
demand, LSI-based
Cloud Storage
Figure 1: Peak shaving is one way to implement
LSI-based cloud storage to handle spikes in demand
cost effectively
Baseline IT Workload and Cost Structure,
in House, for Security and Control l
Time
If demand for IT resources has a different use
period – perhaps your operations organisation
runs ERP weekly, or your sales force loads up the
systems with orders at the end of the month,
or finance and accounting need to run general
ledger at the end of the quarter – the agility of
the cloud, the reliability of storage built on LSI
technologies and the cost savings realised when
the resources are released back into the cloud
are still important considerations in the process
of selecting a cloud storage provider.
Peak shaving is not “all-or-nothing”, see figure 1.
This implementation has IT resources configured
in a traditional in-house data centre to meet an
organisation’s routine, baseline requirements.
Some redundancy, performance, and security
might be derived from this approach, while spikes
in demand are handled without friction by calling
in resources from the cloud when needed.
The space between the spikes in demand
represents savings to the IT budget because
the organisation does not need to spend the
capital or labour to provision for the peaks. From
a financial and staffing perspective, the peaks in
demand are “shaved off”, while users still enjoy
high levels of service.
Data Protection
As a leader in the design of RAID, LSI brings
the benefits of decades of experience in the
business to its customers, who in turn, offer
them to you. The data protection technologies
offered by LSI have been continuously refined
over many years and have all the basic RAID
features serious data protection professionals
expect. One example is media management,
background patrol reads to identify bad sections
on a hard drive and take them out of service
before they become a problem.
RAID 6 is another perfect example. Most RAID
implementations by definition are a way of
organising data across hard drives such that, if
a single drive fails, end users and applications
still have access to data. If a drive fails, RAID lets
end users and applications continue to work
while the failed hard drive is replaced by one of
those spares mentioned previously and data are
reorganized onto the new active member of the
storage group.
If a second drive fails before recovery is
complete after the first drive failed, then no RAID
data protection is available, unless the cloud
storage provider has implemented a solution
such as LSI storage technologies, including
“RAID 6”. LSI offers RAID 6 on select MegaRAID
controllers, and RAID 6 is the industry’s name
for the ability to sustain a second drive failure
without losing access to data.
The good news for storage consumers is that
drive capacity continues to grow quickly. As
of this writing, drives capable of storing two
terabytes are considered mainstream products.
For reference, a two terabyte hard drive has
enough space to store roughly half a million
four megapixel digital photos, around 250
uncompressed full-length standard resolution
DVDs or approximately 20% of all the printed
material in the Library of Congress.
The challenge larger hard drives present to
cloud storage providers and to the users who
depend on them – is that larger hard drives take
longer to “rebuild”. Longer rebuild times make
data more vulnerable to a second drive failure.
Larger hard drives and longer rebuild times
make RAID 6 from LSI a more important part
of a complete data protection strategy than
ever before.
The list of data protection features that come as
standard on MegaRAID controllers is too long
to go through in detail here, but we’ve tried to
share one or two that you can ask about when
you’re trying to evaluate whether your potential
cloud storage provider really has the capability,
really has built a solid foundation, for delivering
on the claims of reliability and performance they
have made and that you require.
Just as the integrated deployment of LSI storage
technologies enabled tiered performance for
maximum flexibility, that same integrated
deployment of LSI storage technologies allows
cloud storage providers to offer tiered, flexible
data protection options that meet your needs.
Cloud Computing, Hype or Reality and How to Tell 5
Further reading
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Copyright ©2011 by LSI Corporation. All rights reserved.
July 2011