Is there IOPS for Cloud Storage? – Nasuni style

I was in Singapore last week attending the Cloud Infrastructure Services course.

In the class, one of the foundation components of Cloud Computing is of course, storage. As the students and the instructor talked about Storage, one very interesting argument surfaced. It revolved around the storage, if it was offered on the cloud. A lot of people assumed that Cloud Storage would be for their databases, and their virtual machines, which of course, is true when the communication between the applications, virtual machines and databases are in the local area network of the Cloud Service Provider (CSP).

However, if the storage is offered through the cloud to applications that are sitting on-premise in the customer’s server room, then we have to think twice of how we perceive Cloud Storage. In this aspect, the Cloud Storage offered by the CSP is a Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), where the key service is Storage. We have to differentiate that this Storage functions as a data container, and usually not for I/O performance reasons.

Though this concept probably will be easily understood by storage professionals like us, this can cause a bit confusion for someone new to the concept of Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage. This confusion, unfortunately, is caused by many of us who are vendors or solution providers, or even publications and magazines. We are responsible to disseminate correct information to customers, but due to our lack of knowledge and experience in this extremely new market of Cloud Storage, we have created the FUDs (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) and hype.

Therefore, it is the duty of this blogger to clear the vapourware, and hopefully pass on the right information to accelerate  the adoption of Cloud Storage in the near future. At this moment, given the various factors such as network costs, high network latency and lack of key network technologies similar to LAN in Cloud Computing, Cloud Storage is, most of the time, for data storage containership and archiving only. And there are no IOPS or any performance related statistics related to Cloud Storage. If any engineer or vendor tells you that they have the fastest Cloud Storage in the industry, do me a favour. Give him/her a knock on the head for me!

Of course, as technologies evolve, this could change in the near future. For now, Cloud Storage is a container, NOT a high performance storage in the cloud. It is usually not meant for transactional data. There are many vendors in the Cloud Storage space from real CSPs to storage companies offering re-packaged storage boxes that are “cloud-ready”. A good example of a CSP offering Cloud Storage is Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service). And storage vendors such as EMC and HDS are repackaging and rebranding their storage technologies as object storage, ready for the cloud. EMC Atmos is really a repackaged and rebranded Centera, with some slight modifications, while HDS , using their Archiving solution, has HCP (aka HCAP). There’s nothing wrong with what EMC and HDS have done, but before the overhyping of the world of Cloud Computing, these platforms were meant for immutable data archiving reasons. Just thought you should know.

One particular company that captured my imagination and addresses the storage performance portion is Nasuni. Of course, they are quite inventive with the Cloud Storage Gateway approach. Nasuni comes up with a Cloud Storage Gateway filer appliance, which can be either a physical 1U server or as a VMware or Hyper-V virtual appliance sitting on-premise at the customer’s site.

The key to this is “on-premise”, which allows access to data much faster because they are locally-cached in the Nasuni filer appliance itself. This Nasuni filer piece addresses the Cloud Storage “performance” piece but Nasuni do not claim any performance statistics with such implementation. The clever bit is that this addresses data or files that are transactional in nature, i.e. NFS or CIFS, to serve data or files “locally”. (I wonder if Nasuni filer has iSCSI as well. Hmmmm….)

In the Nasuni architecture, they “break up” their “Cloud Storage” into 2 pieces. Piece #1 sits on-premise, at the customer site, and acts as a bridge to the Piece #2, that is sitting in a Cloud Storage. From a simplified view, have a look at the diagram below:

 

 

Piece #1 is the component that handles some of the transactional traffic related to files. In a more technical diagram below, you can see that the Nasuni filer addresses the file sharing portion, using the local disks on the filer appliance as a local caching mechanism.

 

Furthermore, older file pieces are whiffed away to the any Cloud Storage using the Cloud Connector interface, hence giving the customer a sense that their storage capacity needs can be limitless if they want to (for a fee, of course). At the same time, the Nasuni filer support thin provisioning and snapshots. How cool is that!

The Cloud Storage piece (Piece #2) is used for the data container and archiving reasons. This component can be sitting and hosted at Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace Cloud Files, Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network and Iron Mountain Archive Services Platform.

The data communication and transfer between the Nasuni filer is secure, encrypted, deduplication and compressed, giving it the efficiency and security that most customers would be concerned about. The diagram below explains the dat communication and data transfer bit.

 

In this manner, the Nasuni filer can replace traditional NAS platforms and can potentially provide a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO) in the long run. Nasuni does not pretend to be a NAS replacement. To me, this concept is very inventive and could potentially change the way we perceive file sharing and file server, obscuring and blurring concept of NAS.

Again, I would like to reiterate that Nasuni does not attempt to say their solution is a NAS or a performance-based Cloud Storage but what they have cleverly packaged seems to be appealing to customers. Their customer base has grown 78% in Q2 of 2011. It’s just too bad they are not here in Malaysia or this part of the world (yet).

IOPS in Cloud Storage? Not yet.

 

A cloud economy emerges … somewhat

A few hours ago, Rackspace had just announced the first “productized” Rackspace Private Cloud solution based on OpenStack. According to Openstack.org,

OpenStack OpenStack is a global collaboration of developers and cloud computing 
technologists producing the ubiquitous open source cloud computing platform for 
public and private clouds. The project aims to deliver solutions for all types of 
clouds by being simple to implement, massively scalable, and feature rich. 
The technology consists of a series of interrelated projects delivering various 
components for a cloud infrastructure solution.

Founded by Rackspace Hosting and NASA, OpenStack has grown to be a global software 
community of developers collaborating on a standard and massively scalable open 
source cloud operating system. Our mission is to enable any organization to create 
and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware. 
Corporations, service providers, VARS, SMBs, researchers, and global data centers 
looking to deploy large-scale cloud deployments for private or public clouds 
leveraging the support and resulting technology of a global open source community.
All of the code for OpenStack is freely available under the Apache 2.0 license. 
Anyone can run it, build on it, or submit changes back to the project. We strongly 
believe that an open development model is the only way to foster badly-needed cloud 
standards, remove the fear of proprietary lock-in for cloud customers, and create a 
large ecosystem that spans cloud providers.

And Openstack just turned 1 year old.

So, what’s this Rackspace private cloud about?

In the existing cloud economy, customers subscribe from a cloud service provider. The customer pays a monthly (usually) subscription fee in a pay-as-you-use-model. And I have courageously predicted that the new cloud economy will drive the middle tier (i.e. IT distributors, resellers and system integrators) in my previous blog out of IT ecosystem. Before I lose the plot, Rackspace is now providing the ability for customers to install an Openstack-ready, Rackspace-approved private cloud architecture in their own datacenter, not in Rackspace Hosting.

This represents a tectonic shift in the cloud economy, putting the control and power back into the customers’ hands. For too long, there were questions about data integrity, security, control, cloud service provider lock-in and so on but with the new Rackspace offering, customers can build their own private cloud ecosystem or they can get professional service from Rackspace cloud systems integrators. Furthermore, once they have built their private cloud, they can either manage it themselves or get Rackspace to manage it for them.

How does Rackspace do it?

From their vast experience in building Openstack clouds, Rackspace Cloud Builders have created a free reference architecture.  Currently OpenStack focuses on two key components: OpenStack Compute, which offers computing power through virtual machine and network management, and OpenStack Object Storage, which is software for redundant, scalable object storage capacity.

In the Openstack architecture, there are 3 major components – Compute, Storage and Images.

More information about the Openstack Architecture here. And with 130 partners in the Openstack alliance (which includes Dell, HP, Cisco, Citrix and EMC), customers have plenty to choose from, and lessening the impact of lock-in.

What does this represent to storage professionals like us?

This Rackspace offering is game changing and could perhaps spark an economy for partners to work with Cloud Service Providers. It is definitely addressing some key concerns of customers related to security and freedom to choose, and even change service providers. It seems to be offering the best of both worlds (for now) but Rackspace is not looking at this for immediate gains. But we still do not know how this economic pie will grow and how it will affect the cloud economy. And this does not negate the fact that us storage professionals have to dig deeper and learn more and this not does change the fact that we have to evolve to compete against the best in the world.

Rackspace has come out beating its chest and predicted that the cloud computing API space will boil down these 3 players – Rackspace Openstack, VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Interestingly, Redhat Aeolus (previously known as Deltacloud) was not worthy to mentioned by Rackspace. Some pooh-pooh going on?