Category: Cloud Storage

Get Ready for Part 2 of Kubernetes in the Cloud

Michelle Tidwell Leave a comment
Michelle Tidwell, SNIA Board of Directors

As enterprises move to a hybrid multi-cloud world, they are faced with many challenges. In addition to decisions surrounding what technologies to use, they are also seeing a transformation in traditional IT roles. Storage admins are asked to be more cloud savvy while new roles of cloud admins are emerging to handle the complexities of deploying simple and efficient clouds. Meanwhile, both these roles are asked to ensure a self-service environment is architected so that application developers can get resources needed to develop cutting edge apps not in week, days or hours but in minutes.

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Understanding Kubernetes in the Cloud

Mike Jochimsen Leave a comment

Ever wonder why and where you would want to use Kubernetes? You’re not alone, that’s why the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative is hosting a live webcast on May 2, 2019 “Kubernetes in the Cloud.”

Kubernetes (k8s) is an open-source system for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Kubernetes promises simplified management of cloud workloads at scale, whether on-premises, hybrid, or in a public cloud infrastructure, allowing effortless movement of workloads from cloud to cloud. By some reckonings, it is being deployed at a rate several times faster than virtualization.

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Has Hybrid Cloud Reached a Tipping Point?

Michelle Tidwell Leave a comment

According to research from the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), IT organizations today are struggling to strike the right balance between public cloud and their on-premises infrastructure. Has hybrid cloud reached a tipping point? Find out on April 23, 2019 at our live webcast “The Hybrid Cloud Tipping Point” when the SNIA CSTI welcomes ESG senior analyst, Scott Sinclair, who will share research on current cloud trends, covering:

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Composable Infrastructure Q&A

Alex McDonald Leave a comment

On February 13, 2019, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI) presented a live webcast, Why Composable Infrastructure? Our goal was to clearly explain the reasoning behind, and the benefits of, composable infrastructure in an educational, vendor-neutral way. We believe our speakers, Philip Kufeldt and Mike Jochimsen, did just that. Now, as promised, Philip and Mike have answered the many interesting questions we received during the live event.

Q. Are composable infrastructure solutions incompatible with virtualized or containerized environments? Will these solutions only serve bare metal environments?

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Understanding Composable Infrastructure

Alex McDonald Leave a comment

Cloud data centers are by definition very dynamic. The need for infrastructure availability in the right place at the right time for the right use case is not as predictable, nor as static, as it has been in traditional data centers. These cloud data centers need to rapidly construct virtual pools of compute, network and storage based on the needs of particular customers or applications, then have those resources dynamically and automatically flex as needs change.

To accomplish this, many in the industry espouse composable infrastructure capabilities, which rely on heterogeneous resources with specific capabilities that can be discovered, managed, and automatically provisioned and re-provisioned through data center orchestration tools. The primary benefit of composable infrastructure results in a smaller grained sets of resources that are independently scalable and can be brought together as required. On February 13, 2019, The SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative is going to examine what’s happening with composable infrastructure in our live webcast, Why Composable Infrastructure? In this webcast, SNIA experts will discuss:

What prompted the development of composable infrastructure?

  • What is composable infrastructure?
  • What are the enabling technologies and potential solutions
  • Enabling technologies (not just what’s here, but what’s needed…)
  • An update on the current status of composable infrastructure standards/products, and where we might be in two to five years

Our goal is to clearly explain the reasoning behind and the benefits of composable infrastructure in an educational, vendor-neutral way. We hope you’ll join us. Our experts will be on hand to answer your questions. Register today to save your spot.

What the “T” Means in SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies

Alex McDonald Leave a comment

The SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) has had a rebrand; we’ve added a T for Technologies into our name, and we’re now officially the Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative (CSTI).

That doesn’t seem like a significant change, but there’s a good reason. Our old name reflected the push to getting acceptance of cloud storage, and that specific cloud storage debate has been won, and big time. One relatively small cloud service provider is currently storing 400PB of clients’ data. Twitter alone consumes 300PB of data on Google’s cloud offering. Facebook, Amazon, AliBaba, Tencent – all have huge data storage numbers.

Enterprises of every size are storing data in the cloud. That’s why we added the word “technologies.” The expanded charter and new name reflect the need to support the evolving cloud business models and architectures such as OpenStack, software defined storage, Kubernetes and object storage. It includes data services, orchestration and management, understanding hyperscale requirements and the role standards play.

So what do we do? The CSTI is an active group that publishes articles and white papers, speaks at industry conferences and presents at highly-rated webcasts that have been viewed by thousands. You can learn more about the CSTI and check out the Infographic for highlights on cloud storage trends and CSTI activities.

If you’re interested in cloud storage technologies, I encourage you to consider joining our group. We have multiple membership options for established vendors, startups, educational institutions, even individuals. Learn more about CSTI membership here.

Simplifying the Movement of Data from Cloud to Cloud

Alex McDonald Leave a comment

We are increasingly living in a multi-cloud world, with potentially multiple private, public and hybrid cloud implementations supporting a single enterprise. Organizations want to leverage the agility of public cloud resources to run existing workloads without having to re-plumb or re-architect them and their processes. In many cases, applications and data have been moved individually to the public cloud. Over time, some applications and data might need to be moved back on premises, or moved partially or entirely, from one cloud to another.

That means simplifying the movement of data from cloud to cloud. Data movement and data liberation – the seamless transfer of data from one cloud to another – has become a major requirement.

On August 7, 2018, the SNIA Cloud Storage Technologies Initiative will tackle this issue in a live webcast, “Cloud Mobility and Data Movement.” We will explore some of these data movement and mobility issues and include real-world examples from the University of Michigan. We’ll discus:

  • How do we secure data both at-rest and in-transit?
  • What are the steps that can be followed to import data securely? What cloud processes and interfaces should we use to make data movement easier?
  • How should we organize our data to simplify its mobility? Should we use block, file or object technologies?
  • Should the application of the data influence how (and even if) we move the data?
  • How can data in the cloud be leveraged for multiple use cases?

Register now for this live webcast. Our SNIA experts will be on-hand to answer you questions.

 

Evaluator Group to Share Hybrid Cloud Research

Alex McDonald Leave a comment

In a recent survey of enterprise hybrid cloud users, the Evaluator Group saw that nearly 60% of respondents indicated that lack of interoperability is a significant technology issue that they must overcome in order to move forward. In fact, lack of interoperability was the number one issue, surpassing public cloud security and network security as significant inhibitors.

The SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI) is pleased to have John Webster, Senior Partner at Evaluator Group, who will join us on December 12th for a live webcast to dive into the findings of their research. In this webcast, Multi-Cloud Storage: Addressing the Need for Portability and Interoperability, my SNIA Cloud colleague, Mark Carlson, and John will discuss enterprise hybrid cloud objectives and barriers to adoption. John and Mark will focus on cloud interoperability within the storage domain and the CSI’s work that promotes interoperability and portability of data stored in the cloud. Read More

Expert Answers to Cloud Object Storage and Gateways Questions

Alex McDonald Leave a comment

In our most recent SNIA Cloud webcast, “Cloud Object Storage and the Use of Gateways,” we discussed market trends toward the adoption of object storage and the use of gateways to execute on a cloud strategy.  If you missed the live event, it’s now available on-demand together with the webcast slides. There were many good questions at the live event and our expert, Dan Albright, has graciously answered them in this blog.

Q. Can object storage be accessed by tools for use with big data?

A. Yes. Technically, access to big data is in real-time with HDFS connectors like S3, but it is  conditional on latency and if it is based on local hard drives, it should not be used as the primary storage as it would run very slowly. The guidance is to use hard drive based object storage either as an online archive or a backup target for HDFS.

Q. Will current block storage or NAS be replaced with cloud object storage + gateway?

A. Yes and no.  It’s dependent on the use case. For ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) uses, only the aged and infrequently accessed data is moved to the gateway+cloud object storage, to take advantage of a lower cost tier of storage, while the more recent and active data remains on the primary block or file storage.  For file sync and share, the small office/remote office data is moved off of the local NAS and consolidated/centralized and managed on the gateway file system. In practice, these methods will vary based on the enterprise’s requirements.

Q. Can we use cloud object storage for IoT storage that may require high IOPS?

A. High IOPS workloads are best supported by local SSD based Object, Block or NAS storage.  remote or hard drive based Object storage is better deployed with low IOPS workloads.

Q. What about software defined storage?

A. Cloud object storage may be implemented as SDS (Software Defined Storage) but may also be implemented by dedicated appliances. Most cloud Object storage services are SDS based.

Q. Can you please define NAS?

A. The SNIA Dictionary defines Network Attached Storage (NAS) as:

1. [Storage System] A term used to refer to storage devices that connect to a network and provide file access services to computer systems. These devices generally consist of an engine that implements the file services, and one or more devices, on which data is stored.

2. [Network] A class of systems that provide file services to host computers using file access protocols such as NFS or CIFS.

Q. What are the challenges with NAS gateways into object storage? Aren’t there latency issues that NAS requires that aren’t available in a typical Object store solution?

A. The key factor to consider is workload.  If the workload of applications accessing data residing on NAS experiences high frequency of reads and writes then that data is not a good candidate for remote or hard drive based object storage. However, it is commonly known that up to 80% of data residing on NAS is infrequently accessed.  It is this data that is best suited for migration to remote object storage.

Thanks for all the great questions. Please check out our library of SNIA Cloud webcasts to learn more. And follow us on Twitter @SNIACloud for announcements of future webcasts.