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STORAGE MAGAZINE ^ STOR May/June 2015 Vol 15, Issue 3 COMMENT - NEWS - NEWS ANALYSIS - CASE STUDIES - OPINION - PRODUCT REVIEWS The UK’s number one in IT Storage WATCHING BRIEF: Increased surveillance brings new storage challenges CHANGE OR DIE? The unstoppable rise of software-defined storage ENTERPRISE SPEED NVMe delivers data faster THREE EASY PIECES Ceph, OpenStack & Hybrid Cloud come together PRODUCT REVIEW: StorMagic SvSAN 5.2 ISSUE SPONSORED BY SUSE

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Page 1: MAGAZINE - Open Source Solutions for Enterprise … › docrep › documents › lmm2sjzg9s › ST1503...system storage in a single unified storage cluster. This makes Ceph flexible,

STORAGEMAGAZINE

^STORMay/June 2015Vol 15, Issue 3

COMMENT - NEWS - NEWS ANALYSIS - CASE STUDIES - OPINION - PRODUCT REVIEWS

The UK’s number one in IT Storage

WATCHING BRIEF:Increased surveillance bringsnew storage challenges

CHANGE OR DIE?The unstoppable rise of software-defined storage

ENTERPRISE SPEEDNVMe delivers data faster

THREE EASY PIECESCeph, OpenStack & Hybrid

Cloud come together

PRODUCT REVIEW:StorMagic SvSAN 5.2

ISSUE SPONSORED BY SUSE

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C O N T E N T S

C O N T E N T S

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C O N T E N T S

www.storagemagazine.co.uk

STORAGEMAGAZINE

^STORMay/June 2015Vol 15, Issue 3

COMMENT - NEWS - NEWS ANALYSIS - CASE STUDIES - OPINION - PRODUCT REVIEWS

The UK’s number one in IT Storage

WATCHING BRIEF:Increased surveillance bringsnew storage challenges

CHANGE OR DIE?The unstoppable rise of software-defined storage

ENTERPRISE SPEEDNVMe delivers data faster

THREE EASY PIECESCeph, OpenStack & HybridCloud come together

PRODUCT REVIEW:StorMagic SvSAN 5.2

ISSUE SPONSORED BY SUSE

Comment.....................................4SOFTWARE-DEFINED COMES TO THE FORE

News..........................................6 Royal Veterinary College goes with NetApp Unitrends 8.1 released

CASE STUDY: LANCASTER UNIVERSITY..............10HDS provides a complete infrastructure solution that covers SAN, NASand backup environments for Lancaster University, helping them toface data demands that were predicted to increase from 300TB to 4PBwithin five years

PRODUCT REVIEW.............................12•StorMagic SvSAN 5.2

CASE STUDY: CISL.............................16The University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership(CISL) has reduced backup time by 90+ percent while still ensuringbusiness continuity of physical and virtual environments

THREE EASY PIECES........................18Hybrid cloud, OpenStack and Open Source Storage are threeessential jigsaw pieces for the enterprise of the future, argues JasonPhippen, Head of Global Product Marketing at SUSE

STRATEGY: FLASH ADOPTION....20The "flash everywhere" trend is actually materialising as "flash where itmakes economic sense", says George Teixeira, CEO of DataCore

WATCHING BRIEF..............................24Our increasingly surveillance-heavy society brings with it challengesto storage technology providers, explains Nick Spittle of Toshiba

TECHNOLOGY: NVME....................28The Non-Volatile Memory Express specification signifies a new ageof SSD technology that exposes flash as memory, and unleashesnon-volatile memory performance, says Scott Harlin of OCZStorage Solutions

CASE STUDY: MPC...........................30Major visual special effects company MPC is using Avere solutions tohelp turn storyboard concepts into billion dollar box office smashes

INTERVIEW: QBS SOFTWARE......32Storage magazine editor David Tyler speaks to Grant James, GeneralManager, QBS Software Ltd., about the difficulties of marketing in anincreasingly 'Internet of Things' world

CHANGE OR DIE?.........................34Predicting the inevitable decline of traditional enterprise storage and the'unstoppable rise' of software-defined alternatives

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ISSUE SPONSORED BY SUSE

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A N A LY S I S

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A N A LY S I S : D ATA C E N T R E S T R AT E G I E S

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Many - if not most - majorenterprises are experiencingenormous increases in the demand

for storage and computing power. Few, ifany, will have the budget to meet risingrequirements that continue to outpace thegrowth in their budgets. This raises a difficultquestion for IT teams everywhere: how longis the usual approach of managing theinstall, upgrade, retire and replace cyclegoing to work?

By now it should be obvious to all that thestrategy that the built the data centre of thepast isn't going to deliver the data centre ofthe future. New models and approaches arebeing embraced by the hyperscalers basedon open source software and commodityhardware. Cloud, we are told, has made ITa utility - as simple and as easy to manage

as your gas bill. Yet, while we all know thereare many advantages to paying by OpExover CapEx, over time cloud can meanpaying more - just in smaller instalments.

As the changes come through there isconsiderable risk for IT teams, who will needto be at pains to squeeze every penny fromexisting investment, make sound choiceswith new ones, and wisely navigate the gapbetween vendor marketing messages,analyst hype and reality.

In this foggy world, some things arecrystal clear: 1. Outside of the 'hyperscalers' hardlyanyone will be able to afford to own andhost all their compute power on premise. Inthe future a proportion of your computepower is going to be in public clouds, one

way or another, sooner or later. 2. Storage growth is massive, unsustainable,and you are going to need to find a better,cheaper way of doing it, and that way isgoing to need to work in harmony with yourcompute decisions. 3. Vendor lock-down is never a good idea.In a world where business models change,discovering you're locked into a cloudprovider might well be one of the mostunpleasant discoveries of your life.

Three things you can do about it:

1. Hybrid cloudAnalysts IDC have named hybrid cloud oneof the biggest IT trends for 2015,forecasting that by the end of the year morethan 65% of enterprises world-wide willcommit to hybrid cloud.

THREE EASY PIECESHYBRID CLOUD, OPENSTACK AND OPEN SOURCE STORAGE ARE THREE ESSENTIAL JIGSAW PIECES FORTHE ENTERPRISE OF THE FUTURE, ARGUES JASON PHIPPEN, HEAD OF GLOBAL PRODUCT MARKETINGAT SUSE

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Hybrid cloud provides a close connectivitybetween physical and virtual systems inside theenterprise and those provided by the likes ofAmazon, Google, and Microsoft Azure.Integrating public and private clouds allowsdata, services and workloads to be moved atthe flick of a switch, with the administratorable to monitor and manage the whole set upvia a single pane of glass.

Sensitive data like corporate IP can keptinside the company firewall, and theenterprise can access additional processingpower during seasonal peaks like Christmas,without the expense of massively scaling uphardware. If you're moving towards ordeploying big data analytics, or yourorganisation experiences any kind ofseasonality, you are unlikely to have thenecessary power in-house in the long term,and so you're going to go hybrid.

However, whilst the concept is easy tounderstand, cloud computing platforms oftendon't interoperate well, and moving data fromone proprietary cloud to another or from aprivate cloud to a public cloud can be asurprisingly difficult and expensive process:Amazon Glacier looks like the ultimate coldstore, and the eye-catching promise of $0.01per GB is absolutely correct, but when youfactor in the bandwidth charges then shouldyou wish to retrieve or move that data theattraction fades.

2. Investigate how OpenStack can help youavoid lock down If you're going to avoid vendor lockdown youare going to need to be able to move datafrom one provider to another and seamlesslyintegrate public and private environments. Ifyou are going to compare prices betweendifferent providers and work with the partner

providing the best mix of service and price,then you are going to need open standards oryou will be locked down without an exit plan.OpenStack meets these requirements.

Originally created by Rackspace and NASAin 2010, OpenStack is an open source cloudsoftware platform supported by hundreds ofvendors, including some of the biggest namesin tech: HP, Intel, Dell, and IBM to name afew. The wide support has made for open APIsdesigned to be as platform agnostic aspossible scaling over a multitude of differentenvironments. OpenStack is compatible withpublic cloud offerings from Amazon EC2 andS3 - and (with a little effort) AWS and GoogleCompute Engine: this is why it's in use withfirms like Ebay, PayPal, & Cisco, and a thefamous CERN research centre. It makes senseto manage your clouds with OpenStack.

3. Choose Ceph for enterprise storage andget your costs under controlCeph began life in 2004 as the brain child ofSage Weill: a college dissertation in support ofhis PhD in Computer Science at the Universityof California Santa Cruz. On completing hismaster's degree Weil started his own hostingcompany, but had struggled with the cost ofproprietary storage. With the support of agrant from the US Department of Energy, Weillwent back to school at the University ofCalifornia and set out to create his ownstorage platform, a platform with no singlepoint of failure, self-healing, replicated tomake it highly fault tolerant, and scalable tothe exabyte level. Over the next decade,through a number of commercial iterations,and with support from the open sourcecommunity, Weill succeeded.

At the heart of Ceph are CRUSH and RADOS. CRUSH: Just as with any distributed file

system, files placed into a Ceph cluster are'striped' so that consecutive segments arestored on different physical storage nodesusing CRUSH - Controlled Replication UnderScalable Hashing, a hash-based algorithmthat calculates how and where to store andretrieve data. CRUSH allows clients tocommunicate directly with storage deviceswithout a central dictionary or index server tomanage object locations, thus enabling Cephclusters to both store and retrieve data veryquickly and access more data concurrently,thereby improving throughput.

RADOS: file block and object storage in asingle platform: the Reliable AutonomicDistributed Object Store, providesapplications with object, block, and filesystem storage in a single unified storagecluster. This makes Ceph flexible, highlyreliable and easy to manage. RADOSenables vast scalability - thousands of clienthosts or KVMs accessing petabytes toexabytes of data. All applications can use theobject, block or file system interfaces to thesame RADOS cluster simultaneously,meaning Ceph storage systems can serve asa flexible foundation for all of your datastorage needs.

BUILD YOUR OWNUsing Ceph, you use 'white boxes' - whatevercommodity x86 hardware you choose (oreven your older end-of-life storage arrays).Because you are free to use commodityhardware and whatever you have to hand,you can avoid being locked into proprietaryplatforms and all the costs that entails: goingsoftware-defined on Ceph can generate costsavings of up to 50% - and for today's hardpressed storage administrator, that'ssomething that has to be investigated. More info: www.suse.com

"Cloud, we are told, has made IT a utility - as simple and as easy to manage

as your gas bill. Yet, while we all know there are many advantages to paying

by OpEx over CapEx, over time cloud can mean paying more - just in smaller

instalments."

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O P I N I O N

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In 1991 Geoffrey Moore published'Crossing the Chasm: Marketing andSelling High-Tech Products to

Mainstream Customers'. This seminalmarketing textbook explored the 'diffusioncurve' - the rate at which new technologyproducts and services are adopted acrossany given market. The book is still in printtoday, is still a bestseller, and as TomByers, Faculty Director of the StanfordTechnology Ventures Program put it, is 'stillthe bible for entrepreneurial marketing'.

The reason for this is simple: Moore'sdescription of the way new technologiesare adopted in enterprises illustrates aclear truth. Even if you haven't read thebook you will be familiar with his terms:'innovators', 'early adopters', 'earlymajority', 'late majority' and 'laggards'.

'Innovators' are people that take upproducts with exciting potential when theyare still in their infancy. This is risky butoffers major rewards. Next are the 'earlyadopters' who see the potential in newtechnology as it becomes workable. Whena technology succeeds with early adopters,it can 'cross the chasm' into early and late'majority' territory: mass-market sales.Finally, there are the 'laggards', last toadopt. Its called chasm for good reason:for every vendor who successfully bridgesthe gap, many more fail.

Moore's description of technologyadoption is especially apt in 'me too'markets where there is little realdifferentiation between products - like theenterprise storage market. Take a look atproprietary solutions from any of the

household names - be that EMC, Dell, HP,or IBM - and you will struggle to find realdifferences. Its like the choice between aBMW, a Jaguar, a Mercedes or a Lexus:everyone has a preference, but there's noclear-cut winner on price, running cost orperformance.

STEP CHANGE AHEADYet, every so often, Moore's take on thediffusion curve is wrong. Circumstancescombine to create a situation where atechnology doesn't just cross the chasm, itbuilds an eight lane motorway andcharges across at speed. For this to occur,two things need to happen:

1. The new technology needs to deliver agenuine step change: real benefits asopposed to marginal differences2. The problem the technology solves oradvantage it delivers must be big enoughto offset early adoption fears

Both of these circumstances are nowpresent in the enterprise storage market,and accordingly the market is going tochange quickly and permanently:traditional enterprise storage vendors arefacing a 'change or die' moment becausethe advantages of software-definedstorage represent a step change.

The cost advantage of software-definedstorage is huge. Software-defined storageeliminates the need for proprietaryhardware and software, so IT teams canwork on commodity x86 hardware anddiscs, generating as much as 50% costsaving. That means massive cost reductionand no vendor lockdown.

PRESSURE POINTSAnd the pressing problem or advantage?The key problems with storage are sooften stated that everyone knows them -we're storing more and more data, muchof it is unstructured and we are keeping itfor indefinite periods.

Here's the top seven pain points asmeasured by 451 Research:

The top three are data growth, costmanagement and capacity forecasting.Together these are a perfect storm: fierceunpredictable growth, management issuesand cost problems.

In these circumstances is it any wonderthat analysts from Gartner to IDC areunited in forecasting the unstoppable riseof software-defined storage? In a word,'no': open source based software-definedstorage marks the beginning of a new eraof more agile, scalable and cost-effectivestorage, and will emerge as the dominantstorage architecture. More info: www.suse.com

'CHANGE OR DIE' FOR THE STORAGE INDUSTRY?JASON PHIPPEN OF SUSE PREDICTS THE INEVITABLE DECLINE OF TRADITIONAL ENTERPRISE STORAGEAND THE 'UNSTOPPABLE RISE' OF SOFTWARE-DEFINED ALTERNATIVES

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