Server StorageIO Data Infrastructure Insights and Analysis
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Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2023 Server StorageIO(TM) and UnlimitedIO All Rights Reserved
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Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
Back in early May I was invited by EMC to attend EMCworld 2015 which included both the public sessions, as well as several NDA based discussions. Keep in mind that there is the known, there is the unknown (or assumed or speculated) and in between there are NDA’s, nuff said on that. EMC covered my hotel and registration costs to attend the event in Las Vegas (thanks EMC, that’s a disclosure btw ;) and here is a synopsis of various EMCworld 2015 announcements.
There were no single major explosive announcements however the sum of all the announcements together should not be over shadowed by the big tent made for TV (or web) big tent productions and entertainment. What EMC announced was effectively how would you like, how do you want and need your storage and associated data services along with management wrapped.
By being wrapped, do you want your software defined storage management and storage wrapped in a legacy turnkey solution such as VMAX3, VNX or Isilon, do you want or need it to be hybrid or all flash, converged and unified, block, file or object.
Or do you need or want the software defined storage management and storage to be "shrink wrapped" as a download so you can deploy on your own hardware "tin wrapped" or as a VSA "virtual wrapped" or cloud wrapped? Do you need or want the software defined storage management and storage to leverage anybody’s hardware while being open source?
How do you need or want your storage to be wrapped to fit your specific needs, that IMHO was the essence of what EMC announced at EMCworld 2015, granted the motorcycles and other production entertainment was engaging as well as educational.
Ok, nuff said for now
Cheers
Gs
Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
Recently I was invited by VMware vCloud Air to do a free hands-on test drive of their actual production environment. Some of you may already being using VMware vSphere, vRealize and other software defined data center (SDDC) aka Virtual Server Infrastructure (VSI) or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) tools among others. Likewise some of you may already be using one of the many cloud compute or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), Centurylink, Google Cloud, IBM Softlayer, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace or Virtustream (being bought by EMC) among many others.
VMware vCloud Air provides a platform similar to those just mentioned among others for your applications and their underlying resource needs (compute, memory, storage, networking) to be fulfilled. In addition, it should not be a surprise that VMware vCloud Air shares many common themes, philosophies and user experiences with the traditional on-premises based VMware solutions you may be familiar with.
You can give VMware vCloud Air a trial for free while the offer lasts by clicking here (service details here). Basically if you click on the link and register a new account for using VMware vCloud Air they will give you up to $500 USD in service credits to use in the real production environment while the offer lasts which iirc is through end of June 2015.
Click on above image to view video part I
Click on above image to view video part II
What this means is that you can go and setup some servers with as many CPUs or cores, memory, Hard Disk Drive (HDD) or flash Solid State Devices (SSD) storage, external IP networks using various operating systems (Centos, Ubuntu, Windows 2008, 20012, 20012 R2) for free, or until you use up the service credits.
Speaking of which, let me give you a bit of a tip or hint, even though you can get free time, if you provision a fast server with lots of fast SSD storage and leave it sit idle over night or over a weekend, you will chew up your free credits rather fast. So the tip which should be common sense is if you are going to do some proof of concepts and then leave things alone for a while, power the virtual cloud servers off to stretch your credits further. On the other hand, if you have something that you want to run on a fast server with fast storage over a weekend or longer, give that a try, just pay attention to your resource usage and possible charges should you exhaust your service credits.
For my test drive, I created a new account by using the above link to get the service credits. Note that you can use your regular VMware account with vCloud Air, however you wont get the free service credits. So while it is a few minutes of extra work, the benefit was worth it vs. simply using my existing VMware account and racking up more cloud services charges on my credit card. As part of this Server StorageIOlab test drive, I created two companion videos part I here and part II here that you can view to follow along and get a better idea of how vCloud works.
Phase one, create the virtual data center, database server, client servers and first setup
My goal was to set up a simple Virtual Data Center (VDC) that would consist of five Windows 2012 R2 servers, one would be a MySQL database server with the other four being client application servers. You can download MySQL from here at Oracle as well as via other sources. For applications to simplify things I used Hammerdb as well as Benchmark Factory that is part of the Quest Toad tool set for database admins. You can download a free trial copy of Benchmark Factory here, and HammerDB here. Another tool that I used for monitoring the servers is Spotlight on Windows (SoW) which is also free here. Speaking of tools, here is a link to various server and storage I/O performance as well as monitoring tools.
Links to tools that I used for this test-drive included:
Phase one steps and activity summary
Recap of what was done in phase one, watch the associated video here.
After the initial setup (e.g. part I video here), the next step was to add some more virtual machines and take a closer look at the environment. Note that most of the work in setting up this environment was Windows, MySQL, Hammerdb, Benchmark Factory, Spotlight on Windows along with other common tools so their installation is not a focus in these videos or this post, perhaps a future post will dig into those in more depth.
What was done during phase II (view the video here)
There is much more to VMware vCloud Air and on their main site there are many useful links including overviews, how-too tutorials, product and service offering details and much more here. Besides paying attention to your resource usage and avoid being surprised by service charges, two other tips I can pass along that are also mentioned in the videos (here and here) is to pay attention what region you setup your virtual data centers in, second is have your network thought out ahead of time to streamline setting up the NAT and firewall as well as gateway configurations.
Learn more about data protection and related topics, themes, trends, tools and technologies via the following links:
Overall I like the VMware vCloud Air service which if you are VMware centric focused will be a familiar cloud option including integration with vCloud Director and other tools you may already have in your environment. Even if you are not familiar with VMware vSphere and associated vRealize tools, the vCloud service is intuitive enough that you can be productive fairly quickly. On one hand vCloud Air does not have the extensive menu of service offerings to choose from such as with AWS, Google, Azure or others, however that also means a simpler menu of options to choose from and simplify things.
I had wanted to spend some time actually using vCloud and the offer to use some free service credits in the production environment made it worth making the time to actually setup some workloads and do some testing. Even if you are not a VMware focused environment, I would recommend giving VMware vCloud Air a test drive to see what it can do for you, as opposed to what you can do for it…
Ok, nuff said for now
Cheers
Gs
Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
This is part of an ongoing series of posts that part of www.storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/ on data protection including archiving, backup/restore, business continuance (BC), business resiliency (BC), data footprint reduction (DFR), disaster recovery (DR), High Availability (HA) along with related themes, tools, technologies, techniques, trends and strategies.
Keep in mind that a fundamental goal of an Information Technology (IT) organization is to protect, preserve and serve data and information in a cost-effective as well as productive way when needed. There is no such thing as an information recession with more data being generated and processed. In addition to more of it, data is also getting larger, having more dependencies on it being available as well as living longer (e.g. retention).
A quick easy proof point of more data and it getting larger is your cell phone and the pictures it take. Compare the size of those photos today to what you had in your previous generation of smart phone or even digital camera as the Mega Pixels (e.g. resolution and size of data) increased, along with the size of media (e.g. storage) to save those to also grew. Another proof point is look at your presentations, documents, web sites and other mediums with how the amount of rich or unstructured content (e.g. photos, videos) exists on those now vs. a few years ago. Yet another proof-point is to look at your structured little data databases and how there are more rows and columns, as well as how some of those columns have gotten larger or are point to external "blobs" or "objects" that have also gotten larger.
There has been industry buzz the past several years around data protection modernizing, modernizing data protection or simply modernizing backup along with modernizing your data and information infrastructure. Many of these conversations focus around swapping out an older technology in favor of whatever the new industry buzzword trend is (e.g. swap tape for disk, disk for cloud) or perhaps from one data protection, backup, archive or copy tool for another. Some of these conversations also focus around swapping legacy for virtual, cloud or some other variation of software defined marketing.
What is common with all the above is basically swapping out one technology, tool, medium or technique for another new one yet using it in old ways. For example tape gets swapped for disk, yet the same approach to when, where, why, how often and what gets copied or protected is left the same. Sure some new tools and technologies get introduced. However when was the last time you put the tools down, took a step back and revisited the fundamental questions of how and why you are doing data protection the way it is being done? When was the last time you thought about data protection as an asset or business enabler as opposed to a cost center, overhead or after thought?
What’s in your data protection toolbox, do you know what to use when?
One of the challenges with modernizing is that there is a cost involved including people time, staff skills as well as budgets not to mention keeping things running, so how do you go about paying for any improvements? Sure you can go get a data infrastructure or habitat for technology aka data home improvement loan, however there are costs associated to that.
So why not self-fund the improvements and modernization activities by finding and removing costs, eliminating complexity vs. moving and masking issues? Part of this can be accomplished by simply revisiting if you are treating all your applications and data the same from a data protection perspective. Are you providing a data protection service ability to your organization that is based on business wants or business needs? For example, does the business want recovery time objective (RTO) 0 and recovery point objective (RPO) 0 for all applications, while it needs RTO 4 hours and RPO 15 minutes for application-a while application-b requires RTO 12 hours and RPO of 2 hours and application must have RTO 24 hours with RPO of 12 hours?
As a reminder RTO is how much time, or how quickly you need your applications and data to be restored and made ready for use. RPO is the point in time to where data needs to be protected as of, or the amount of data or time frame data could be lost or missing. Thus RTO = 0 means instant recovery no downtime and RPO = 0 means no loss of data. RTO one day and RPO of ten (10) minutes means applications and their data are ready for use within 24 hours and no more than 10 minutes of data can be lost (e.g. the granularity of protection coverage)., Also keep in mind that you can have various RTO and RPO combinations to meet your specific application along with business needs as part of a tiered data protection strategy implementation.
With RTO and RPO in mind, when was the last time you sat down with the business and applications people to revisit what they want vs. what they must have? From these conversation you can easily Transition into how long to keep, how many copies in what place among other things which in turn allows you to review data protection as well as start using both old and new technologies, tools and techniques in new ways.
Learn more about data protection and related topics, themes, trends, tools and technologies via the following links:
Data protection is a broad topic that spans from logical and physical security to HA, BC, BR, DR, archiving (including life beyond compliance) along with various tools, technologies, techniques. Key is aligning those to the needs of the business or organization for today’s as well as tomorrows requirements. Instead of doing things what has been done in the past that may have been based on what was known or possible due to technology capabilities, why not start using new and old things in new ways. Let’s start using all the tools in the data protection toolbox regardless of if they are new or old, cloud, virtual, physical, software defined product or service in new ways while keeping the requirements of the business in focus.
Keeping with the theme of protect preserve and serve, data protection to be modernized needs to become and be seen as a business asset or enabler vs. an after thought or cost over-head topic. Also, keep in mind that only you can prevent data loss, are your restores ready for when you need them? as well as one of the fundamental goals of IT is to protect, preserve and serve information including its applications as well as data when, where needed in a cost-effective way.
What say you?
Ok, nuff said for now
Cheers
Gs
Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
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Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
Recently I was invited to be a guest on the podcast Data Protection Gumbo hosted by Demetrius Malbrough (@dmalbrough).
Data Protection Gumbo Podcast Description |
Data Protection Gumbo Also available on
Keep in mind that a fundamental role of Information Technology (IT) is to protect, preserve and serve business or organizations information assets including applications, configuration settings and data for use when or where needed.
Our conversation covers various aspects of data protection which has a focus of protect preserve and serve information, applications and data across different environments and customer segments. While we discuss enterprise and small medium business (SMB) data protection, we also talk about trends from Mobile to the cloud among many others tools, technologies and techniques.
Learn more about data protection and related trends, tools and technologies via the following links:
Data Protection Gumbo Also available on
Data protection is a broad topic that spans from logical and physical security to high availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR), business continuance (BC), business resiliency (BR), archiving (including life beyond compliance) along with various tools, technologies, techniques. Keeping with the theme of protect preserve and serve, data protection to be modernized needs to become and be seen as a business asset or enabler vs. an after thought or cost over-head topic. Also, keep in mind that only you can prevent data loss, are your restores ready for when you need them?
Check out Demetrius Data Protection Gumbo podcast, also check out his Linkedin Backup & Recovery Professionals group. Speaking of data protection, check out the www.storageioblog.com/data-protection-diaries-main/ page for more coverage of backup/restore, HA, BC, DR, archiving and restated themes.
Ok, nuff said, for now..
Cheers gs
Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
It’s springtime in Kentucky and recently I had the opportunity to have a conversation with Kendrick Coleman to talk about S3motion, Buckets, Containers, Objects, AWS S3, Cloud and Object Storage, node.js, EMCcode and open source among other related topics which are available in a podcast here, or video here and available at StorageIO.tv.
In this Server StorageIO industry trends perspective podcast episode, @EMCcode (Part of EMC) developer advocate Kendrick Coleman (@KendrickColeman) joins me for a conversation. Our conversation spans spring-time in Kentucky (where Kendrick lives) which means Bourbon and horse racing as well as his blog (www.kendrickcoleman.com).
Btw, in the podcast I refer to Captain Obvious and Kendrick’s beard, for those not familiar with who or what @Captainobvious is that is made reference to, click here to learn more.
@Kendrickcoleman & @Captainobvious
Of course we also talk some tech including what is EMCcode, EMC Federation, Cloud Foundry, clouds, object storage, buckets, containers, objects, node.js, Docker, Openstack, AWS S3, micro services, and the S3motion tool that Kendrick developed.
Kendrick explains the motivation behind S3motion along with trends in and around objects (including GET, PUT vs. traditional Read, Write) as well as programming among related topic themes and how context matters.
I have used S3motion for moving buckets, containers and objects around including between AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage (GCS) and Microsoft Azure as well as to/from local. S3motion is a good tool to have in your server storage I/O tool box for working with cloud and object storage along with others such as Cloudberry, S3fs, Cyberduck, S3 browser among many others.
You can get S3motion free from git hub here.
Here are some links to learn more about AWS S3, Cloud and Object Storage along with related topics
Context matters when it comes to many things particular about objects as they can mean different things. Tools such as S3motion make it easy for moving your buckets or containers along with objects from one cloud storage system, solution or service to another. Also check out EMCcode to see what they are doing on different fronts from supporting new and greenfield development with Cloud Foundry and PaaS to Openstack to bridging current environments to the next generation of platforms. Also check out Kendricks blog site as he has a lot of good technical content as well as some other fun stuff to learn about. Look forward to having Kendrick on as a guest again soon to continue our conversations. In the meantime, check out S3motion to see how it can fit into your server storage I/O tool box.
Ok, nuff said, for now..
Cheers gs
Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
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Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently among other enhancements announced new Simple Storage Service (S3) cross-region replication of objects from a bucket (e.g. container) in one region to a bucket in another region. AWS also recently enhanced Elastic Block Storage (EBS) increasing maximum performance and size of Provisioned IOPS (SSD) and General Purpose (SSD) volumes. EBS enhancements included ability to store up to 16 TBytes of data in a single volume and do 20,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). Read more about EBS and other recent AWS server, storage I/O and application enhancements here.
The challenge is being able to move data (e.g. objects) stored in AWS buckets in one region to another in a safe, secure, timely, automated, cost-effective way.
Even though AWS has a global name-space, buckets and their objects (e.g. files, data, videos, images, bit and byte streams) are stored in a specific region designated by the customer or user (AWS S3, EBS, EC2, Glacier, Regions and Availability Zone primer can be found here).
The following diagram shows the challenge and how to copy or replicate objects in an S3 bucket in one region to a destination bucket in a different region. While objects can be copied or replicated without S3 cross-region replication, that involves essentially reading your objects pulling that data out via the internet and then writing to another place. The catch is that this can add extra costs, take time, consume network bandwidth and need extra tools (Cloudberry, Cyberduck, S3fuse, S3motion, S3browser, S3 tools (not AWS) and a long list of others).
Highlights of AWS S3 Cross-region replication include:
To activate, you simply enable versioning on a bucket, enable cross-region replication, indicate source bucket (or prefix of objects in bucket), specify destination region and target bucket name (or create one), then create or select an IAM (Identify Access Management) role and objects should be replicated.
There are several regions around the world and up until today AWS customers could copy, sync or replicate S3 bucket contents between AWS regions manually (or via automation) using various tools such as Cloudberry, Cyberduck, S3browser and S3motion to name just a few as well as via various gateways and other technologies. Some of those tools and technologies are open-source or free, some are freemium and some are premium for a few that also vary by interface (some with GUI, others with CLI or APIs) including ability to mount an S3 bucket as a local network drive and use tools to sync or copy.
However a catch with the above mentioned tools (among others) and approaches is that to replicate your data (e.g. objects in a bucket) can involve other AWS S3 fees. For example reading data (e.g. a GET which has a fee) from one AWS region and then copying out to the internet has fees. Likewise when copying data into another AWS S3 region (e.g. a PUT which are free) there is also the cost of storage at the destination.
For my first hands on (first look) experience with AWS cross-region replication today I enabled a bucket in the US Standard region (e.g. Northern Virginia) and created a new target destination bucket in the EU Ireland. Setup and configuration was very quick, literally just a few minutes with most of the time spent reading the text on the new AWS S3 dashboard properties configuration displays.
I selected an existing test bucket to replicate and noticed that nothing had replicated over to the other bucket until I realized that new objects would be replicated. Once some new objects were added to the source bucket within a matter of moments (e.g. few minutes) they appeared across the pond in my EU Ireland bucket. When I deleted those replicated objects from my EU Ireland bucket and switched back to my view of the source bucket in the US, those new objects were already deleted from the source. Yes, just like regular mirroring or replication, pay attention to how you have things configured (e.g. synchronized vs. contribute vs. echo of changes etc.).
While I was not able to do a solid quantifiable performance test, simply based on some quick copies and my network speed moving via S3 cross-region replication was faster than using something like s3motion with my server in the middle.
It also appears from some initial testing today that a benefit of AWS S3 cross-region replication (besides being bundled and part of AWS) is that some fees to pull data out of AWS and transfer out via the internet can be avoided.
Here are some links to learn more about AWS S3 and related topics
For those who are looking for a way to streamline replicating data (e.g. objects) from an AWS bucket in one region with a bucket in a different region you now have a new option. There are potential cost savings if that is your goal along with performance benefits in addition to using what ever might be working in your environment. Replicating objects provides a way of expanding your business continuance (BC), business resiliency (BR) and disaster recovery (DR) involving S3 across regions as well as a means for content cache or distribution among other possible uses.
Overall, I like this ability for moving S3 objects within AWS, however I will continue to use other tools such as S3motion and s3sfs for moving data in and out of AWS as well as among other public cloud serves and local resources.
Ok, nuff said, for now..
Cheers gs
Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
This is part of an ongoing data protection diaries series of post about, well, cloud and data protection and what I’m doing pertaining to World Backup Day 2015 along with related topics.
In case you forgot or did not know, World Backup Day is March 31 2015 (@worldbackupday) so now is a good time to be ready. The only challenge that I have with the World Backup Day (view their site here) that has gone on for a few years know is that it is a good way to call out the importance of backing up or protecting data. However its time to also put more emphasis and focus on being able to make sure those backups or protection copies actually work.
By this I mean doing more than making sure that your data can be read from tape, disk, SSD or cloud service actually going a step further and verifying that restored data can actually be used (read, written, etc).
The problem, issue and challenges are simple, are your applications, systems and data protected as well as can you use those protection copies (e.g. backups, snapshots, replicas or archives) when as well as were needed?
The opportunity is simple, avoiding downtime or impact to your business or organization by being proactive.
The following is my preparation checklist for World Backup Data 2015 (e.g. March 31 2015) which includes what I need or want to protect, as well as some other things to be done including testing, verification, address (remediate or fix) known issues while identifying other areas for future enhancements. Thus perhaps like yours, data protection for my environment which includes physical, virtual along with cloud spanning servers to mobile devices is constantly evolving.
My data protection preparation, checklist and to do list
While I already have a strategy, plan and solution that encompasses different tools, technologies and techniques, they are also evolving. Part of the evolving is to improve while also exploring options to use new and old things in new ways as well as eat my down dog food or walk the talk vs. talk the talk. The following figure provides a representation of my environment that spans physical, virtual and clouds (more than one) and how different applications along with systems are protected against various threats or risks. Key is that not all applications and data are the same thus enabling them to be protected in different ways as well as over various intervals. Needless to say there is more to how, when, where and with what different applications and systems are protected in my environment than show, perhaps more on that in the future.
Some of what my data protection involves for Server StorageIO
What I’m doing is going through my checklist to verify and confirm the various items on the checklist as well as find areas for improvement which is actually an ongoing process.
Do I find things that need to be corrected?
Yup, in fact found something that while it was not a problem, identified a way to improve on a process that will once fully implemented enabler more flexibility both if a restoration is needed, as well as for general everyday use not to mention remove some complexity and cost.
Speaking of lessons learned, check this out that ties into why you want 4 3 2 1 based data protection strategies.
Here are some extra links to have a look at:
Data Protection Diaries
Cloud conversations: If focused on cost you might miss other cloud storage benefits
5 Tips for Factoring Software into Disaster Recovery Plans
Remote office backup, archiving and disaster recovery for networking pros
Cloud conversations: Gaining cloud confidence from insights into AWS outages (Part II)
Given outages, are you concerned with the security of the cloud?
Data Archiving: Life Beyond Compliance
My copies were corrupted: The 3-2-1 rule
Take a 4-3-2-1 approach to backing up data
Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networks – Chapter 8 (CRC/Taylor and Francis)
Be prepared, be proactive when it comes to data protection and business resiliency vs. simply relying reacting and recovering hoping that all will be ok (or works).
Take a few minutes (or longer) and test your data protection including backup to make sure that you can:
a) Verify that in fact they are working protecting applications and data in the way expected
b) Restore data to an alternate place (verify functionality as well as prevent a problem)
c) Actually use the data meaning it is decrypted, inflated (un-compressed, un-de duped) and security certificates along with ownership properties properly applied
d) Look at different versions or generations of protection copies if you need to go back further in time
e) Identify area of improvement or find and isolate problem issues in advance vs. finding out after the fact
Time to get back to work checking and verifying things as well as attending to some other items.
Ok, nuff said, for now…
Cheers gs
Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
Drew Robb (@robbdrew) has a good piece (e.g. article) over at InfoStor titled Eight Ways to Avoid Cloud Storage Pricing Surprises that you can read here.
Drew start’s his piece out with this nice analogy or story:
| Let’s begin with a cautionary tale about pricing: a friend hired a moving company as they quoted a very attractive price for a complex move. They lured her in with a low-ball price then added more and more “extras” to the point where their price ended up higher than many of the other bids she passed up. And to make matters worse, they are already two weeks late with delivery of the furniture and are saying it might take another two weeks. |
Drew extends his example in his piece to compare how some cloud providers may start with pricing as low as some amount only for the customer to be surprised when they did not do their homework to learn about the various fees.
Note that most reputable cloud providers do not hide their fees even though there are myths that all cloud vendors have hidden fees, instead they list what those costs are on their sites. However that means the smart shopper or person procuring cloud services needs to go look for those fee’s and what they mean to avoid surprises. On the other hand if you can not find what extra fee’s would be along with what is or is not included in a cloud service price, to quote Jenny’s line in the movie Forest Gump, "…Run, Forest! Run!…".
In Drew’s piece he mentions five general areas to keep an eye on pertaining cloud storage costs including:
In Drew’s piece, he includes a comment from myself shown below.
Just as in the moving business, lowballing is alive and well in cloud pricing. Greg Schulz, an analyst with StorageIO Group, warned users to pay attention to services that have very low-cost per GByte/TByte yet have extra fees and charges for use, activity or place service caps. Compare those with other services that have higher base fees and attempt to price it based on your real storage and usage patterns. “Watch out for usage and activity fees with lower cost services where you may get charged for looking at or visiting your data, not to mention for when you actually need to use it,” said Schulz. “Also be aware of limits or caps on performance that may apply to a particular class of service.” |
As a follow-up to Drew’s good article, I put together the following thoughts that appeared earlier this year over at InfoStor titled Cloud storage: Is It All About Cost? that you can read here. In that article I start out with the basic question of:
So what is your take on cloud storage, and in what context? Is cloud storage all about removing cost, cost cutting, free storage? Or perhaps even getting something else in addition to free storage? |
I routinely talk with different people from various backgrounds, environments from around the world, and the one consistency I hear when it comes to cloud services including storage is that there is no consistency.
What I mean by this is that there are the cloud crowd cheerleaders who view or cheer for anything cloud related, some of them actually use the cloud vs. simply cheering.
Simple, how do you know if cloud is cheaper or more expensive if you do not know your own costs?
How do you know if cloud storage is available, reliable, durable if you do not have a handle on your environment?
Are you making apples to oranges comparisons or simple trading or leveraging hype and fud for or against?
| Similar to regular storage, how you choose to use and configure on-site traditional storage for high-availability, performance, security among other best practices should be applied to cloud solutions. After all, only you can prevent cloud (or on premise) data loss, granted it is a shared responsibility. Shared responsibility means your service provider or system vendor needs to deliver quality robust solution that you can then take responsibility for configure to use with resiliency. |
For some of you perhaps cloud might be about lowering, reducing or cutting storage costs, perhaps even getting some other service(s) in addition to free storage.
On the other hand, some of you might be
Yet another class of cloud storage (e.g. AWS EBS) are those intended or optimized to be accessed from within a cloud via cloud servers or compute instances (e.g. AWS EC2 among others) vs. those that are optimized for both inside the cloud as well as outside the cloud access (e.g. AWS S3 or Glacier with costs shown here). I am using AWS examples; however, you could use Microsoft Azure (pricing shown here), Google (including their new Nearline service with costs shown here), Rackspace, (calculator here or other cloud files pricing here), HP Cloud (costs shown here), IBM Softlayer (object storage costs here) and many others.
Not all types of cloud storage are the same, which is similar to traditional storage you may be using or have used in your environment in the past. For example, there is high-capacity low-cost storage, including magnetic tape for data protection, archiving of in-active data along with near-line hard disk drives (HDD). There are different types of HDDs, as well as fast solid-state devices (SSD) along with hybrid or SSHD storage used for different purposes. This is where some would say the topic of cloud storage is highly complex.
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In my opinion there are cheap clouds (products, services, solutions) and there are low-cost options as well as there are value and premium offerings. Avoid confusing value with cheap or low-cost as something might have a higher cost, however including more capabilities or fees included that if useful can be more value. Look beyond the up-front cost aspects of clouds also considering ongoing recurring fees for actually using a server or solution.
If you can find low-cost storage at or below a penny per GByte per month that could be a good value if it also includes many free access, retrieval GETS head and lists for management or reporting. On the other hand, if you find a service that is at or below a penny per GByte per month however charges for any access including retrieval, as well as network bandwidth fees along with reporting, that might not be as good of a value.
Look beyond the basic price and watch out for statements like "…as low as…" to understand what is required to get that "..as low as.." price. Also understand what the extra fee’s are which most of the reputable providers list these on their sites, granted you have to look for them. If you are already using cloud services, pay attention to your monthly invoices and track what you are paying for to avoid surprises.
From my InfoStor piece: For cloud storage, instead of simply focusing on lowest cost of storage per capacity, look for value, along with ability to configure or use with as much resiliency as you need. Value will mean different things depending on your needs and cloud storage servers, yet the solution should be cost-effective with availability including durability, secure and applicable performance. |
Shopping for cloud servers and storage is similar to acquiring regular servers and storage in that you need to understand what you are acquiring along with up-front and recurring fee’s to understand the total cost of ownership and cost of operations not to mention making apples to apples vs. apples to oranges comparisons.
Btw, instead of simply using lower cost cloud services to cut cost, why not also use those capabilities to create or park another copy of your important data somewhere else just to be safe…
What say you about cloud costs?
Ok, nuff said, for now…
Cheers gs
Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
It’s that time of the year again for award season:
Eric has run for several years now an annual top VMware, Virtualization, Storage and related blogs voting now taking place until March 16th 2015 (click on the image below). You will find a nice mix of new school, old school and a few current or future school theme blogs represented with some being more VMware specific. However there are also many blogs at the vpad site that have a cloud, virtual, server, storage, networking, software defined, development and other related themes.
Click on the above image to cast your vote for favorite:
My StorageIOblog.com has been on the vLaunchPad site for several years now as well as having syndicated content that also appears via some of the other venues listed there.
In addition to my StorageIOblog and podcast, you will also find many of my fellow VMware vExperts among others at the vLaunchpad site so check them out as well.
This is a people’s choice process (yes it is a popularity process of sorts as well) however also a way of rewarding or thanking those who take time to create and share content with you and others. If you take time to read various blogs, listen to podcasts as well as consume other content, please take a few moments and cast your vote here (thank you in advance) which I hope includes StorageIOblog.com as part of the top ten, as well as being nominated in the Storage, Podcast and Independent blogger categories.
Ok, nuff said, for now…
Cheers gs
Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
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Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio
All Comments, (C) and (TM) belong to their owners/posters, Other content (C) Copyright 2006-2024 Server StorageIO and UnlimitedIO LLC All Rights Reserved
