Ten Approaches to GeneratingBig Cost Savings on SixEnterprise Storage Use Cases

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Storage White PaperTen Approaches to Generating Big Cost Savings on Six Enterprise Storage Use Cases

Analyst firms might make varying projections of total market growth and value, but they are all agreed on one thing: growth is rapid, exponential. It doesn’t grow in annual percentage terms, but by orders of magnitude, making storage one of the biggest drains on enterprise IT budget.

The technology itself is constantly changing, with new features and benefits arriving on an ongoing basis. In the past few years we’ve seen capacity improvements from de-duplication, huge increases in iOPs (input/output per second) from the introduc-tion of Flash and hybrid arrays that combine disk and Flash.En terprises have gone to great lengths to make the optimum environment, adopting best-of-breed technology, tiering data according to access rates and improving disaster recovery ca-pability, consistently adding to the infrastructure array on array, project on project, year after year. The result is a highly complex, multi-vendor environment crying out for consolidation and the resulting simplicity. Few storage architects would choose their existing setup given the chance to build from scratch.

The cost of disk may have plummeted, and Flash may be fol-lowing suit, but that doesn’t mean architects are finding it easy to keep up with rising costs. Far from it. Complexity continues to increase, and the sums of money involved in keeping pace with rising data volumes and requirements provoke difficult conversations with the CIO and the CFO. Today’s architects are under sustained pressure to find ways of reducing cost without compromising on capabilities. Meanwhile, data pools are rapidly becoming data lakes.

To cope successfully with the escalating requirements for those data lakes, to allow them to be cleaned of pollution and enable data scientists to provide the management board with the 360 degree view of the business they demand from analytics, ad-ministrators need to deliver high availability, high performance storage, consolidate and simplify it to reduce the management headache and find ways to add to storage, all without breaking the bank—no small challenge.

Enterprise Data Storage: Complex, Expensive, and Mission-CriticalSince former Meta Group analyst Doug Laney (now at Gartner) famously defined the three V’s of big data in 2001, we’ve all been seeing increases in the volume of data stored.

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In theory, the best way to achieve these objectives is to do away with expensive proprietary hardware and software in favor of industry-standard commodity hardware run on free open source software that works across standard infrastructure—including cabling and switches. In practice, fears about the maturity, sta-bility and capability of open source, software-defined storage hold IT teams back from realizing the cost savings they need.

This paper examines why that should no longer be the case, illustrates typical use cases and provides a look into the future roadmap of SUSE Enterprise Storage™ to explain how—as so often happens in the technology market—the rules of the game have changed and changed in favor of the storage buyer away from vendors.

Perfecting the SANConsolidating storage—often the first step towards cost con-trol—can be difficult and disruptive, particularly in mission-crit-ical environments with complex dependencies, different and non-compatible proprietary software and variations in the me-dia itself. However, volume growth being what it is, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is ultimately a losing strategy because if it isn’t broken now, it soon will be. It’s no small wonder there’s such a large industry in providing the IT team with guidance, support and help with troubleshooting when, as any admin can tell you, things don’t go quite as planned.

The challenge lies in bringing together multiple SANs so that capability can be pooled between different applications and storage media, right-sizing provisioning can be more easily achieved, and costs can be more readily controlled. Done right, consolidation means you can add capacity without increasing complexity—like pouring more water into a single pool instead of topping up hundreds of individual buckets. It follows that getting your platform choice right is hugely important.

Making the Right Platform ChoiceStorage platforms are typically compared on the basis of a num-ber of capabilities, taking into consideration different require-ments. Here’s Gartner’s comparison criteria for software defined storage—all 26 of them.

Relatively few platforms tick every box (at least not without an enormous accompanying price tag), but a few are particularly important in the enterprise—the top four being:

Manageability—easeofinstallation,centralizedmanagement,monitoringandreporting.

Interoperability—unifiedblock/file/object,heterogeneousOS(fabricandnative)

Efficiency—cachetiering,deduplication/compression,hierarchicalstoragemanagement,thinprovisioning,anderasurecoding

Availability—back-up/archive,continuousdataprotection,remotereplication

SUSE Enterprise Storage is the first open source software de-fined storage solution to meet all four critical enterprise require-ments with robust, mature and hardened software.

Your Choice: iSCSI versus Fibre ChannelThere are two main approaches to SAN: dedicated Fibre Channel (FC) and iSCSI. FC is a highly stable and mature technology, pre-dating iSCSI by nine years and is usually considered the gold standard in the enterprise. In FC, storage arrays are connected to servers via dedicated fibre to dedicated fibre switches, which in turn link to fibre HBAs (Host Bus Adaptors) on the target array,

Deployed as Bare Metal on Windows Server

Microsoft Hyper-V

Clones

Deployed as a Virtual Machine

KVM Integrated Encryption

Scale-out Architecture Global Namespace Synchronous Replication

Scale-up Architecture Compression Policy Based Management

SMB Protocol Deduplication Provisioned at the VM Level

MFS Protocol Auto-Tiering Managed at VM Level

iSCSI Thin Provisioning Provisioned at the LUN Level

Channel Space Reclamation Provisioned at the Volume Level

VMware vSphere Snapshots

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Storage White PaperTen Approaches to Generating Big Cost Savings on Six Enterprise Storage Use Cases

with up to a maximum speed of 16GB/s and with speeds expected to increase to 32GB/s and even 128GB/s over the next few years. The key word here is “dedicated” because the links aren’t shared with any other network traffic; there is low latency; and this, ac-companied with intelligent routing on the switches, makes it diffi-cult to saturate the links with enough traffic to impair performance. This makes for very low latency and arguably more bandwidth than is actually required, certainly for spinning disk, though not, perhaps, for Flash—at least where the fabric is concerned. (There’s plenty of space for performance bottlenecks elsewhere.)

iSCSI came onto the market shortly after the turn of the century, exploiting the opportunity raised by the cost and complexity of fibre channel. Fibre channel switches and HBAs are not cheap, and the dedicated fabric requires dedicated skills, adding thousands to the cost of purchase. In contrast, iSCSI uses Ethernet as its communications fabric. This means that iSCSI is cheaper in terms of headcount as no special skills are needed and that commodity switches and cabling can be used in its deployment, thereby gen-erating major cost savings. On a typical 10GB/s network, the differ-ence in throughput can be negligible: it’s actually tough to saturate a 1GB/s link, let alone a 16GB/s link. So, unless you’re actually in the one percent of organizations that really needs the performance of fibre, you’re probably best off saving it for high performance requirements and standardizing everywhere else on iSCSI.

SUSE Brings iSCSI to Ceph: The Leading Open Source Software Defined Storage SolutionCeph is the leading open source software defined storage plat-form. Ceph stores data on a single distributed computer cluster, providing interfaces for object, block and file-level storage. Ceph can be completely distributed without a single point of failure, is scalable to the exabyte level and is an open source platform. Ceph replicates data, providing fault tolerance, and uses com-modity hardware (even your existing hardware no matter who supplied it). The design provides for storage that is self-heal-ing and self-managing, thereby reducing administration costs. Compared with proprietary hardware and software solutions, Ceph can deliver savings in the region of 40-to-50 percent.

However, until now Ceph had a problem: a lack of support for heterogeneous operating systems. This effectively limited it to Linux and limited its appeal as an approach to consolidation, be cause it meant big savings on only a small part of your SAN infrastructure that could not be applied to the majority. (This is a bit like 50 percent off one wheel of your new car instead of 50 percent off the car itself.) While the current community version of Ceph supports object storage and block storage, and while file support is coming soon, it isn’t there yet.

However, this picture is changing very rapidly: SUSE is first to market with a Ceph version delivering robust support of the universally accepted iSCSI standard. This translates into near universal cost savings and amplifies the appeal of open source software defined storage by the same order of magnitude that is powering data storage growth. SUSE Enterprise Storage is a truly game-changing technology that can deliver vastly more affordable storage in the long term regardless of data growth. Commodity cabling and routing + commodity infrastructure skills + commodity servers and media + open source software = massive savings that proprietary vendors cannot compete with.

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Version 2.0 Capabilities: Here Now and Coming Soon

Version 2.0 of SUSE Enterprise Storage fully supports block as well as object storage. CephFS support will arrive in short order, and heterogeneous OS access is in place now, making the technology—and the cost savings it delivers—broadly ap-plicable in the data center. Heterogeneous support has been achieved by building on and extending the long-established, robust, hardened and enterprise proven Linux-IO Target, deliver-ing capability you can trust.

SUSE Enterprise Storage 2 iSCSI support delivers robust soft-ware defined storage that is VMware-aware and works across UNIX variants like IBM AIX, Microsoft and Linux.

Open source offers other advantages for the hard pressed IT team, too. Not least of these is the easy portability of data across the hybrid cloud and into different off-premise providers: a critical requirement for avoiding expensive vendor lock-in. Storage administrators attracted to the public cloud need to work out the cost of extracting data as well as storing it to avoid unpleasant surprises—especially when it comes to the cold store.

Why Your Storage Roadmap Should— and Arguably Must—Include Open SourceSUSE believes the future of big data lies in open source. So should you. Why? Because open source projects dominate the big data landscape. The majority of big data analytics projects today are built on Hadoop, and the majority of real-time data

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Storage White PaperTen Approaches to Generating Big Cost Savings on Six Enterprise Storage Use Cases

analytics projects in the future will be based on Apache Spark, both of which are open source projects. The number of active users of Spark has doubled in the past year, and the number of active developers has risen six-fold in the past two years, making Spark the single largest Apache project.* Investment is in place from IBM, venture capital groups like Andreessen Horowitz and NEA, so funding is abundant. In fact, open source is already a de facto standard in big data analytics.

Open source projects share many developers motivated by the same working ethos, who readily borrow code from each other. They meet at the same conventions and share staff and informa-tion from the highest to the lowest level. In other words, open source development roadmaps don’t happen in isolation.

The convergence of storage and analytics roadmaps is inevita-ble: one roadmap for the data lake, for analytics and for storage. At the very least you are going to need to build your capability, or you are at risk of every CEO and shareholder’s worst night-mare: a competitor who is making better decisions than you, more quickly, on more accurate data, who is more agile and who gets products to market faster than you, products that custom-ers want more, and which are genuinely better than yours. In this digital era with its fast-changing business models, company boards dream of being the next Netflix, and fear being the next Blockbuster Video in equal measure.

Ten Approaches to Generating Large-Scale Cost Savings on Six Enterprise Storage Use CasesUse SUSE Enterprise Storage 2.0 to:

Buildstorageoncommodityx86serverstocreatemultiplenodesoverEthernet

UseRESTfulAPIs(SwiftorAmazonS3)tomovedatabetweenresources,onandoffpremise

AchievesimilartotalcostofstoragetoAmazonGlacier—whileavoidingheavychargesformovingdataatspeedorreturningittoonpremiseintheeventofneed

Keepyourstorageonpremiseatthesameorlowercostthanthecheapestcloudservices(Developmentsinanalytics

haveatendencytorenderseeminglyuselessdatausefulandyouneverknowwhenyouwillneedit.)

Reducecapacityrequiredforredundancyusingerasurecoding

Usewithyourexistingarchivingsoftware(e.g.,VeritasNetBackuporCommvaultSimpana,etc.)tobuildblockorobjectstorage

Replicatecopiesforredundancyacrossstandardnetworkfabric

UseasaVERYLARGEdiskarrayandachieveheterogeneousnetworkaccessacrossVMware,Windows,Linux,etc.

UseforyourWindowsfilestoreandgeneral-purposeblockstorage

Userapiddisk-to-diskbackup Automaticallytiercacheddataaccordingtousefrequency

Cut the cost of:

1. Object storage2. Archiving3. Bulk block storage4. Data backup5. VMware data repository or backup6. Rich media and video/audio storage

What’s Holding You Up? Two Questions You Should Ask YourselfThe arrival of iSCSI on Ceph is a game-changing technology de-velopment. For the first time ever, commodity hardware and open source software have combined to generate huge cost savings and flexibility with a roadmap that protects you against dramatic rises in the cost of storage and sets your organization on the right path for the big data architecture future. No longer limited to Linux-powered web apps, open source software defined storage is spreading to the entire enterprise, and its effect is revolutionary. __________

* www.computing.co.uk/ctg/analysis/2432898/what-is-spark-six-reasons-why-cios-should-find-out-and-one-why-they-shouldnt/page/2

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With the growth in data volumes accelerating, and open source becoming the dominant force in big data analytics, ask yourself:

1. How long can you continue to pay for proprietary hardware and software?

2. How quickly will the roadmaps for open source big data analytics and open source storage converge?

Open source software defined storage should come under the category of “if not when,” and SUSE can put you on the path to cost savings, now.

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