HGST Object Storage for a New Generation of IT

Transcription

1 Enterprise Strategy Group Getting to the bigger truth. SOLUTION SHOWCASE HGST Object Storage for a New Generation of IT Date: October 2015 Author: Scott Sinclair, Storage Analyst Abstract: Under increased pressure from decades of rapid data growth coupled with a desire to unlock greater value from data via analytics, IT organizations have begun to seek new data storage alternatives. For many environments, the status quo of traditional storage cannot provide the scale, the flexibility, or the cost-effectiveness required by today s application environment. The HGST Active Archive System seeks to provide an answer with its softwaredefined object storage architecture designed to deliver a flexible and cost-effective design option while supporting massively scalable storage. Overview Few trends have had a greater influence on IT infrastructure design than the rapid growth of data. As such, the burden of higher levels of digital content generation combined with demands to store data longer is nothing new to IT data centers. What may be new, however, is the cumulative toll that years of data growth have taken on the existing storage infrastructures. For many environments, the traditional NAS array model is no longer sustainable there are simply too many arrays, LUNs, file systems, and protection policies (e.g., backups, replicas, etc.) to manage. As storage capacities grow to multiple petabytes and beyond, inefficiencies in RAID technology combined with high capacity multi-terabyte drives can extend rebuild times to weeks. Long rebuild times can significantly increase the risk of data loss should another simultaneous failure occur. Replication and other data protection techniques also become more difficult to manage and more expensive to scale. To improve efficiency and competitiveness, businesses are leveraging big data analytics to glean insights from archived or less active data. This adds to the storage infrastructure burden because data that was historically stored away on tape now must remain online and accessible. In 2015, ESG conducted a research study investigating storage industry trends. As part of this study, ESG surveyed 373 IT decision makers responsible for their organizations data storage environments. When asked to identify their organization s biggest storage challenge, the rapid growth of data was the most common response. While that response was expected, what is somewhat surprising is that many of the other top responses can be considered symptoms of data growth. Challenges such as increased hardware costs, data protection costs, and staffing costs were cited by respondents and are all created by or exacerbated by the data growth. 1 As a result, IT organizations are evaluating and adopting object storage solutions to help mitigate these challenges. Unlike RAID-based NAS solutions, object storage leverages a flat address space that allows it to scale to higher capacity levels, while continuing to provide high levels of resiliency by using erasure coding. Object storage solutions often leverage erasure coding to maintain high data resiliency and availability for high-capacity environments too large for traditional data protection methods to function effectively. With object storage, capabilities like multi-site resiliency can be accomplished 1 Source: ESG Research Report, 2015 Data Storage Market Trends, October All ESG research references and charts in this solution showcase have been taken from this research report. This ESG Solution Showcase was commissioned by HGST and is distributed under license from ESG.

2 Solution Showcase: HGST Object Storage for a New Generation of IT 2 automatically for the entire storage pool, rather than requiring admins to manage file systems or LUNs individually. The result can significantly simplify storage management. Additionally, object storage solutions can leverage commercial offthe-shelf hardware, helping to keep storage costs under control. Object storage has also become the prevailing storage technology behind some of the largest cloud storage providers in the world today, thanks in large part to its scalability, durability, and accessibility. With these capabilities, object storage technology found success in high-capacity storage use cases like active archiving and disk-based backup. Industries such as life sciences/genomics, media and entertainment, healthcare, financial services, and energy exploration have all benefited from object solutions. Additionally, object s scalable and flexible architecture has generated interest in more recent and advanced IT workloads, as well, such as on-premises cloud environments or data analytics. In response, HGST is now offering the HGST Active Archive System to serve the needs of massively scalable capacity storage infrastructure needs. Why IT Is Deploying Object Storage As mentioned previously, ESG conducted a research study in 2015 investigating storage industry trends. In addition to investigating storage challenges, ESG also asked IT decision makers specifically about object storage. When respondents familiar with object storage were asked what factors led to the deployment or consideration of object technology, a couple of different storylines emerged. When IT respondents were asked to list multiple factors (see Figure 1), their responses revealed a desire to leverage object storage to reduce the massive IT capital expenditures and management complexities required to keep up with the rapid growth of unstructured data. The second storyline is revealed in the data around the primary factor driving deployment or consideration of object storage. Here, the data indicates that as organizations look to deploy a storage foundation for the next generation of workloads, they need a solution with the benefits, both technical and financial, that object storage can offer. FIGURE 1. Factors Driving Deployment or Consideration of Object Storage To the best of your knowledge, which of the following factors are responsible for your organization s initial deployment or consideration of object storage technology? (Percent of respondents, N=305) Reduction in capital expenditures 13% 49% Simplified management of unstructured data Reduction in operational expenditures Foundation for cloud-based storage solution 15% 12% 17% 48% 46% 45% Most important factor driving deployment or consideration of object storage technology Total cost of ownership (TCO) Repository for data collected as part of BI/analytics initiatives Improved regulatory compliance Repository for archived data 13% 11% 10% 8% 44% 42% 41% 39% All factors driving initial deployment or consideration of object storage technology Don't know 1% 1% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, 2015

3 Solution Showcase: HGST Object Storage for a New Generation of IT 3 In this same research study, respondents familiar with object storage were asked to indicate the impact they expected it to have on their existing NAS footprint over the next three years. The results revealed that a strong majority of organizations surveyed expect a reduction in NAS, with 25% of respondents indicating that they expect object storage to completely eliminate their NAS footprint and an additional 45% stating they expect object storage to significantly reduce their existing NAS Shift from NAS to Object Storage footprint. Of those organizations familiar with object storage, The HGST Active Archive System was designed to serve organizations as they seek to modernize their storage infrastructure to deal with massive data growth and emerging workload demands. HGST Object Storage for the Latest Set of IT Workloads 25% expect object to completely eliminate their existing NAS footprint and an additional 45% expect object to significantly reduce their existing NAS footprint. This data suggests that for many organizations, unstructured data growth is already At the core of the HGST Active Archive System is EasiScale object exceeding or projected to exceed the limit of NAS storage software deployed using commercial off-the-shelf technology in technology. an easy to deploy fully integrated rack-level configuration. Combined with HGST s second generation proven HelioSeal disk drive platform, the solution offers differentiated value for a variety of horizontal and vertical use cases. Object storage is about scale and accessibility at scale, whether that scale comes in the form of storage capacity or the number and variety of files. For workloads where scale is critical today, or rapidly getting there, object storage is seeing increased adoption. Active archiving environments are designed to not only store and protect large repositories of data for extended periods of time, but also to ensure that data is easily accessible for analysis when necessary. These archives are helping businesses be more agile and find new ways to monetize their information assets. Similarly, object storage s costeffective deployment model and high durability has found success in simplifying backup and recovery environments as well. In addition to these more traditional object storage use cases, a number of emerging workloads are driving greater interest in and adoption of object storage, and subsequently HGST s solution. On-premises cloud storage: As mentioned previously, ESG s research identified that the most commonly cited factor generating interest in object storage was its potential for providing a foundation for cloud storage. As IT organizations investigate deploying on-premises cloud environments, HGST s helium drive technology uses 23% less power than drives with air, enabling IT to deploy high-density storage with a significantly low power footprint. On-premises storage solutions that leverage commercial off-the-shelf technology like HGST can deliver storage solutions that rival or even surpass the cost-effectiveness of off-premises public cloud solutions over time. Additionally, on-premises solutions that can integrate with public cloud resources to form hybrid storage cloud ecosystems offer the potential for even greater benefits. Big data repository for analytics: In the research study mentioned previously, ESG also asked participants to identify which IT workload would drive the greatest amount of storage growth in their environments over the next two years, and the number one response was business intelligence and data analytics. As organizations deploy the infrastructure required to support business intelligence workloads, object storage architectures offer a single scalable pool of storage that allows analytics workloads access to more content. This single pool design ultimately increases the amount of data that can be used for decision-making. More data for decision-making can drive better, faster outcomes and help to identify new growth areas and revenue streams. With the new s3a connector that is part of the Apache Hadoop project, both Hadoop and Spark clusters can point directly to the HGST Active Archive System. HGST was a major contributor to the s3a code and continues to provide performance enhancements and bug fixes. Content distribution: With the rise of mobile devices, the distribution of content to end-users is becoming increasingly important. As such, more organizations are requiring a storage solution that can scale performance with capacity for

4 Solution Showcase: HGST Object Storage for a New Generation of IT 4 delivering rich-media content, while keeping costs under control. Additionally, object storage solutions like HGST s that offer the ability to geographically distribute content can ensure that the latest content is available automatically at remote sites anywhere in the world. HGST Active Archive System Feature Overview Scalability: 4.7PB per rack with Exabyte global namespace and trillions of objects per bucket. Durability/Availability: 15 nines with a single copy of data. Tolerates five simultaneous failures, and a full data center outage in a three-site configuration. Performance: 3.5GB/s per rack aggregate throughput. Scales linearly as capacity grows. Multi-Site: Native synchronous multi-geo support with WAN latency performance optimizations. Protocols: Native S3-compliant, NFS, SMB with NAS gateway. Self-Healing: Data is rapidly repaired and rebalanced automatically in the background without intervention or user disruption. The cumulative impact of decades of data growth and accumulation has led the industry to a tipping point where, for many organizations and workloads, the storage infrastructure status quo is unsustainable. Many of the traditional NAS architectures were not designed for the content levels seen today, let alone the content levels the industry might expect five or ten years from now. The increased levels of durability and availability offered by HGST s Active Archive System can enable IT organizations to reliably maintain only the primary copy of data, without the added cost and complexity of replicas or tape backups. The net result can translate into a significant reduction in the total cost of ownership (TCO). For these newer workloads, more IT organizations are taking the opportunity to adopt object storage for a more scalable and ultimately more sustainable and cost-effective storage architecture. The Bigger Truth Ultimately, all IT design decisions are business decisions. Historically, when IT was seen as a cost center, the decision-making process was often dominated by a drive for efficiency, in order to keep costs and budgets under control, while continuing to provide basic services. In recent years, however, more businesses are starting to look at their data differently as an asset rather than a liability. As businesses seek a competitive edge, more IT organizations are tasked with not only continuing to deploy more costeffective infrastructure, while ensuring data availability and accessibility, but also with making sure the business can leverage digital assets to glean insights for improved decision-making. This increased pressure on the storage infrastructure to scale bigger, protect longer, and keep more data active in more locations has led to a transition to object storage for many organizations. Workloads such as on-premises cloud storage, content distribution, and active content archiving are driving organizations to seek alternatives to the siloed traditional approach to storage. Object storage is designed to solve not only the scale challenges of today, but also the challenges that organizations may encounter a decade or two in the future. Ultimately, at the rate that unstructured data is growing in many environments, the transition to a massively scalable storage solution, such as object storage, is inevitable. When deploying a storage foundation for a business-critical data repository, selecting an architecture to support the long-term needs of the data simply makes business sense. Similar to the way in which solid-state storage has disrupted the low-latency performance storage space, object storage solutions, such as the HGST Active Archive System, are helping organizations to recognize its potential to serve as the platform of choice for high-capacity storage moving forward. For many storage environments, the status quo is already unsustainable. IT organizations deploying object storage can help ensure their data centers are prepared for the capacity challenges of today and the future.

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