Volume 15, Issue V & VI
Hello and welcome to this joint May and June 2015 Server StorageIO update newsletter. Here in the northern hemisphere its summer which means holiday vacations among other things.
There has been a lot going on this spring and so far this summer with more in the wings. Summer can also be a time to get caught up on some things, preparing for others while hopefully being able to enjoy some time off as well.
In terms of what have I been working on (or with)? Clouds (OpenStack, vCloud Air, AWS, Azure, GCS among others), virtual and containers, flash SSD devices (drives, cards), software defining, content servers, NVMe, databases, data protection items, servers, cache and micro-tiering among other things.
Speaking of getting caught up, back in early May among many other conferences (Cisco, Docker, HP, IBM, OpenStack, Red Hat and many other events) was EMCworld. EMC covered my hotel and registration costs to attend the event in Las Vegas (thanks EMC, that’s a disclosure btw ;). View a summary StorageIOblog post covering EMCworld 2015 here along with recent EMC announcements including Acquisition of cloud services vendor Virtustream for $1.2B, and ECS 2.0.
Server and Storage I/O Wrappings
This months newsletter has a focus on software and storage wrappings, that is, how your storage or software is packaged, delivered or deployed. For example traditional physical storage systems, software defined storage as shrink-wrap or download, tin-wrapped software as an appliance, virtual wrapped such as a virtual storage appliance or cloud wrapped among others.
OpenStack software defined cloud
OpenStack (both the organization, community, event and software) continue to gain momentum. The latest release known as Kilo (more Kilo info here) was released in early April followed by the OpenStack summit in May.
Some of you might be more involved with OpenStack vs. others, perhaps having already deployed into your production environment. Perhaps you, like myself have OpenStack running in a lab for proof of concept, research, development or learning among other things.
You might even be using the services of a public cloud or managed service provider that is powered by OpenStack. On the other hand, you might be familiar with OpenStack from reading up on it, watching videos, listening to podcast’s or attending events to figure out what it is, where it fits, as well as what can your organization use it for.
Drew Robb (@Robbdrew) has a good overview piece about OpenStack and storage over at Enterprise Storage Forum (here). OpenStack is a collection of tools or bundles for building private, hybrid and public clouds. These various open source projects within the OpenStack umbrella include compute (Nova) and virtual machine images (Glance). Other components include dashboard management (Horizon), security and identity control (Keystone), network (Neutron), object storage (Swift), block storage (Cinder) and file-based storage (Manila) among others.
It’s up to the user to decide which pieces you will add. For example, you can use Swift without having virtual machines and vice versa. Read Drew’s complete article here.
Btw, if you missed it, not only has OpenStack added file support (e.g. Manila), Amazon Web Services (AWS) also recently added Elastic File Services (EFS) complementing there Elastic Block Services (EBS).
Focus on Storage Wrappings
Software exists and gets deployed in various places as shown in the following examples.
- Cloud wrapped software – software that can be deployed in a cloud instance.
- Container wrapped software – software deployed in a docker or other container
- Firmware wrapped software – software that gets packaged and deployed as firmware in a server, storage, network device or adapter
- Shrink wrapped software – software that can be downloaded and deployed where you want
- Tin wrapped software – software that is packaged or bundled with hardware (e.g. tin) such as an appliance or storage system
- Virtual wrapped software
Data Protection Diaries
Modernizing Data Protection
Using new and old things in new ways
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.
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. Read more from this post here.
In case you missed it:
View other recent as well as past blog posts here
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