Data Availability & Data Protection for the IoT World

New York cityscape

New York, “The City That Never Sleeps”. A very fitting moniker for a city that is full of energy and excitement. Servers located in data centers all around the world are constantly crunching numbers and generating analytics in every financial institution in New York. Why are some of these servers located worldwide? Well, for a variety of reasons, but in my humble opinion, it is to ensure that data is always on and always available. After all, we are talking about billions of dollars in capital electronically managed by the New York Stock Exchange alone.

By 2020, it is predicted that there will be at least 20+ billion internet connected devices. As your business grows, so will the amount of data and storage that you will need. We’ll obviously need solutions to protect our data on-premise or in the cloud. A company that can make sure customers data is always on, secure, highly available, and also protected, rules the IoT WORLD.

modern storage requirementsBut in order to serve and protect your data for the always on, always available IoT world, what requirements should we take into account before deploying any data protection or storage solution? If you are a data protection geek, you’ll most likely see some of your requirements being listed on the right. If you are a data protection solutions provider, you guys definitely rock! Data protection solutions such as Commvault, NetBackup, Rubrik, Veeam, etc. are likely the solutions you have in-house to protect your corporate data centers and your mobile devices. These are software-defined and they are designed to be highly available for on-premise or in-the-cloud data protection.

What about storage? What would you consider? I am sure there are many well-known storage providers you can easily name. But with the new kids on the block disrupting the storage market, would lowering your operating costs ($0.005/GB per month) and meeting the above-listed requirements pique your interest?

Amazon S3 and Cloudian
Cloudian is a software-defined storage company. The solution is fully S3 compliant, which means that if you are familiar with Amazon S3, you’ll love the features that comes with this solution. If you are not, as a data protection geek with more than 15 years of experience, I invite you to give Cloudian HyperStore free trial a shot. The features and capabilities of Cloudian HyperStore as a scale-out storage solution with true multi-tenancy is pretty cool in my books. Imagine being able to deploy and grow storage as you need it for your corporate user home directories, backups, archiving, and even object storage for virtualization solutions (i.e. Red Hat OpenStack). The use cases for scale-out storage solutions are vast. There is no more hardware vendor lock-in as you can easily select between the options of a Cloudian HyperStore appliance or commodity servers to roll-your-own scale-out storage with Cloudian HyperStore software.

Imagine that you, as a storage administrator, can easily provide Storage as a Service (STaaS) to all your users. Take a look at the image below. The granular object level management that is available on a per user basis is pretty sweet. I can provide access to my files/objects with read and/or write permissions, with object level ACL and share the object via a public URL access.
Cloudian object level management

To top it all off, I can also limit the maximum number of downloads of that specific object that I want to share. As a service provider, you can also use the analytics inherent in the solution to implement chargeback to your customers on every account that you manage using Cloudian HyperStore smart storage solution.

Best of all, if you decide that you want to move your data to Amazon, use Cloudian Hyperstore’s built-in auto-tiering feature. Dynamically move your data to Amazon S3 if you choose to do so. You don’t have to take my word for it. Cloudian will provide you with a 45-day free trial. Try it out today.

Reinventing Storage Administration at Scale with Cloudian HyperStore 6.0

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At Cloudian, we are continuously enhancing and evolving our flagship product HyperStore, a fully S3-compatible object storage technology. But even with all our rich history of innovative releases, I’m most proud of the upcoming Cloudian HyperStore 6.0 – we have risen to a new challenge…@scale operations. How do we help IT administrators manage Petabytes of storage and still have time for a cup of tea?

As data volumes start to outpace operating budgets and the headcount needed to manage them, today’s enterprises are turning to full-featured, low-cost software defined storage technologies with almost limitless scalability and accessibility. While the software can be deployed on low-cost commodity hardware, thereby reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO), the cost of managing storage infrastructures – managing operations, performance, protecting data and tuning workflows and processes – has remained fixed.

A 2016 Gartner report found that the TCO for a terabyte of traditional on-premises storage was $2009 per terabyte, with 62 percent of the costs resulting from hardware and software acquisition ($1245). The operational costs associated with this terabyte of storage were 26 percent of the total, or $511, with “other” costs adding up to 12 percent ($253).

With software-defined storage like Cloudian HyperStore, the TCO for a terabyte of storage now drops to $866 per year, and with costs as low as one cent per gigabyte per month, hardware and software acquisition are reduced to just 14 percent of the total costs, or $122.

Unfortunately, as reported by Gartner, the cost of operations for this model remains fixed at $511, which now represents 58 percent of total yearly storage costs, significantly outweighing hardware and software expense. It’s clear that to further drive costs from cloud storage, organizations will need to find ways to reduce management burden and operational costs.

Cloudian HyperStore 6.0 is designed to help operate and manage at scale. The new release simplifies and automates the operational management of cloud storage by creating new system management features, which scale to meet the requirements of multi-petabyte, multi-region storage deployments. It lowers the management costs and reduces administrative burden. HyperStore 6.0 advances the vision Cloudian has shared for Smart Data Storage by delivering fully integrated smart data operations within the platform for seamless and extremely cost-efficient management.

The basis for many of 6.0’s key features came from our customers. They shared their “wish list” of management tools and functionality that could streamline or eliminate the manual tasks that normally weigh down the storage admin in 100+ node deployments.

Introducing Storage Operations and Management @Scale

 

Cloudian HyperStore 6.0 provides new tools, user interfaces and automated features to scale management and operational efficiency across complex cloud storage infrastructures, lowering storage management costs for enterprises and streamlining operational tasks for storage administrators. The new 6.0 release can reduce operations management as nodes are added, helping lower the overall operational costs to businesses as data volumes continue to grow. HyperStore 6.0 also provides greater data durability with more continuous automated failure resolution, and delivers robust system tuning tools for proactive and low-cost management of system health and operational efficiency for data storage at petabyte scale.

Operations @scale. In Cloudian HyperStore 6.0, an entirely new operations console provides an instant 360-degree view into storage system performance, with an enhanced GUI that greatly increases the visibility of key data. The new operations console enables storage admins to view and manage hundred of nodes across multiple data centers and cloud environments in a single screen, while automating such operations as adding and removing nodes with the simple configuration of an IP address. And the user interface isn’t just to look at: Users can click on the data representations to drill down and access detailed information and take action directly from the interface screen. 6.0 also automates non-disruptive, node-by-node rolling technical patches and upgrades that are delivered via touchless distribution and management systems, saving time and resources for storage admins.

Cloudian HyperStore operations console HyperStore’s newly renovated operations console provides a 360-degree, drillable view of the health of your system

Durability @scale. HyperStore 6.0 also extends data durability with automated features that constantly evaluate data integrity – even data at rest – to ensure that storage within the system is always repaired and data is always verified. When the system identifies data failures, it proactively repairs and rebuilds them. The Cloudian HyperStore 6.0 system proactively monitors and scans workflows for I/O or disk failure, which Smart Redirect features can track and map to help trigger automatic repairs. The new release enables both local cache replication for data protection and Amazon S3 cross-region replication – one of Cloudian’s many rich S3 compatible features – for regulatory compliance and disaster recovery.

Cluster rebalance and data rebuild information The storage admin can view cluster rebalance and data rebuild information from HyperStore’s robust analytics capabilities

Tuning @scale. Cloudian HyperStore 6.0 simplifies system tuning to optimize the infrastructure for the highest level of system health and data protection. Visual Storage Analytics automatically identifies “hot spots” and rebalances workflows for storage I/O protection. It also can locate object parts using new “Object GPS” functionality that track data distribution with high granularity across nodes, racks and data centers around the globe.

HyperStore 6.0 operations console The HyperStore 6.0 operations console allows the storage admin to view real-time capacity consumption and system performance

As before, Cloudian continues to keep pace with incorporating changes to the AWS S3 API into HyperStore. Cloudian is the leading object storage vendor with 100 percent S3 compatibility, and the only vendor to offer an S3 guarantee.

To learn more about how Cloudian HyperStore 6.0 can help your company simplify and automate the operational management of your hybrid storage infrastructures, contact Cloudian at www.cloudian.com.

Also watch this blog over the next few weeks as we add more detailed posts about the features of 6.0.

Stay tuned,

Paul

Harness the Power of Software-Defined Infrastructure to Help Solve the Biggest Big Data Storage Challenges

With the popularity of rich media, the proliferation of mobile devices and the digitization of content, there has been an exponential growth in the amount of unstructured data that IT is managing (think medical images or large research data sets).  And this growth is not slowing but increasing. This unprecedented growth is just not sustainable for IT organizations as they try to control costs and limit or reduce the operational complexity in the datacenter.  Enter the need for an evolution in IT – for Software-Defined Infrastructure, and software-defined storage solutions to help store and manage the Big Data tidal wave.

 

Intel and Cloudian understand the powerful benefits behind software-defined infrastructure, and the real value it delivers to businesses and to the IT organizations behind them. We have been working together to deliver the true benefits of SDI to our joint customers with the world’s largest Big Data storage needs. From enterprises in Life Sciences, Media & Entertainment, and Financial Services, to Service Providers like ScaleMatrix, who serve their customers with new, innovative hosted cloud storage solutions, we help them store and manage petabyte-scale data, easily, securely, and cost-effectively.

Cloudian develops 100-percent software-defined object storage software.  We’ve joined Intel’s Storage Builders alliance, an elite group of independent software vendors focused on delivering on the benefits of software-defined infrastructure with innovative software-defined storage solutions. We’re pleased to join the larger Intel’s Builders family of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), operating system vendors (OSVs), and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to support the group’ mission to accelerate global adoption of software-defined infrastructure, including cloud, storage, and networking technologies. We’ve contributed Cloudian’s validated software-defined object storage designs, along with Cloudian HyperStore – our scale-out, ready-to go, object storage software – to deliver customers all the benefits of software-defined storage: scalability, agility, and the choice to build on-premise or hybrid clouds at the lowest cost. We’ve qualified the Intel Xeon processor D-1500 product family for use with Cloudian HyperStore. We’ve also developed a comprehensive reference architecture for Cloudian HyperStore powered by Lenovo hardware.

Customers love the flexibility and scalability of software-defined storage. They can quickly deploy HyperStore for on-premise cloud storage that’s easy to manage but that also allows choice to automatically tier some or all of their data to any S3-compatible cloud in a hybrid model. Global enterprises use HyperStore to easily and securely manage their data stored across multiple datacenters, and Service Provider businesses take advantage of HyperStore’s software-defined architecture to deliver Storage as a Service (StaaS) product offerings to their customers. They are able to quickly deploy and manage these services while easily making updates to continuously deliver new features to their customers.

Together, Cloudian, Intel, and other leading vendors, including Lenovo, are helping organizations embrace the business value of software-defined infrastructure.  We put the power of software-defined object storage in the hands of our joint customers to make their IT organizations, and their infrastructures strong, agile, and ready to meet the demands of their Big Data.

Learn more about Cloudian and Intel Storage Builders.