Identify the Right Gateway Product for Storage in the External Cloud

Transcription

1 G Identify the Right Gateway Product for Storage in the External Cloud Published: 25 August 2011 Analyst(s): Pushan Rinnen, Gene Ruth, Stanley Zaffos This report analyzes the emerging external gateway market profiles some key vendors products for Gartner's user clients. As external offerings become increasingly available, it is important for user clients to know what gateway choices are available when they want to leverage to augment or replace their onpremises storage. Key Findings Gateways for external augment or replace local storage with play an important role in the overall success of external services. These gateways are not yet ready for enterprise-scale data center deployment but can address branch office storage requirements in many cases. The majority of the data that the gateways push to the external cloud today are latencyinsensitive workloads, such as backup, disaster recovery, inactive file data. Many vendors in this space are startups with very limited installed bases. Recommendations Make gateways part of any plan to access, but proceed cautiously due to the nascent nature of the gateway product category. Plan to use multiple public cloud providers to minimize dependence on a single service provider. Create mitigation plans to access cloud data in case the gateway vendors exit the market. Choose gateways that compare well against conventional SAN or NAS disk arrays map workloads that best fit the gateway the cloud.

2 What You Need to Know An external cloud is an IT capability that is offered as a service to a business that is not hosted by the business's IT organization. An external cloud can be public or private, but must be implemented by a third-party service provider. With the emergence of external public services offerings such as Amazon S3 has come a new crop of independent cloud gateway vendors products to help users leverage public. At the same time, some cloud gateways have been developed to augment external private services. These gateways are onpremises appliances that offer an easier-to-manage /or more efficient way to migrate data to an external cloud. Gateway architectures vary by vendor are often tailored to address specific workload types. Some use embedded internal storage as a local cache to boost performance; others focus on local storage tiering with as an extended tier. Some are dedicated for backup data only; some are designed to archive older files to an external cloud; others are more versatile with different use cases. Some focus on supporting multiple public platforms, while others focus more on supporting external or internal private services. The br-new products designed from the ground up tend to have more comprehensive features for the cloud, whereas repositioned products are still weak in their cloud support capabilities. This research doesn't include gateways available only through a specific service offering, as users of that particular services offering would not have the option of choosing a different gateway. Analysis Market Technology Definitions Segmentation Gartner defines an external cloud as an IT capability that is offered as a service to a business that is not hosted by the business's own IT organization. An external cloud can be public or private, but must be implemented by a third-party service provider. All public clouds are external, but a private cloud can be internal or external. This research focuses on gateways that bridge to external. Gartner defines public as a storage utility offering owned by a public cloud service provider that uses the pay-per-use model software-agnostic, reservationless provisioning. Examples include Amazon S3, Microsoft Windows Azure Storage Nirvanix. External private is defined as a storage utility offering owned by an external private cloud service provider whose storage services are subscribed to by a select group of organizations not just any consumer. Examples include some regional telecom providers managed service providers. The external gateway market includes a new set of products that function as onpremises gateways (hardware or software appliances) to. They connect to external via Internet APIs or protocols such as REST or HTTP. They support local servers or clients via stard storage access protocols such as Internet Small Computer System Interface (iscsi), Network File System (NFS) Common Internet File System (CIFS). Architecturally, they can be segmented into the following three models: Page 2 of 10 Gartner, Inc. G

3 Cache devices The gateway provides advanced caching algorithms to mask performance limitations associated with. Examples of this type of gateway include Nasuni, Riverbed Whitewater, TwinStrata. All of these focus on leveraging public. Tiered devices The gateway provides on-premises storage tiers such as solid-state drives (SSDs) disk drives, as well as cloud tiers that reside at service providers. Two distinct product types exist within this category. One has integrated local storage tiers, such as StorSimple, which was designed from the ground up for leveraging public. The other is repositioned file virtualization devices that can migrate or tier data among other onpremises storage arrays the cloud. Examples include EMC's Cloud Tiering Appliance F5 Networks' ARX Cloud Extender, both of which do not store user data on the appliances. Copy/synchronization devices The gateway provides remote replication synchronization services among the same devices deployed at different sites (both user premises external private cloud providers' sites), similar to those offered by conventional storage arrays for an internal cloud. Examples include CTERA Networks Panzura. Gartner also calls those gateways with embedded local primary storage "hybrid storage appliances," which are designed to serve limited local primary storage for the most active data, while pushing relatively inactive data to the public cloud via an embedded gateway that connects to the seamlessly. To the users hosts, it behaves as a normal storage system. The term "hybrid" is used to describe the attribute of combining local storage. From a data flow perspective, it is a storage target or an in-b appliance that intercepts all input/outputs (I/Os) to from a virtual volume or file system. From a storage system perspective, it uses sophisticated cache management algorithms to minimize data flows to from the public cloud by satisfying as many I/Os as possible from local storage. Data is often compressed or deduplicated in the appliance to increase its effective cache capacity, when data is actually transferred to or from the cloud; WAN-optimized controller (WOC) techniques are often used to reduce the impact of link latency on performance. Examples of hybrid storage appliances include CTERA, Nasuni, Panzura, StorSimple TwinStrata. Introduction External gateways are a nascent phenomenon, because external services are still in the early stage of development. A viable offering of external cloud gateway appliances didn't really emerge until Nevertheless, as long as external remains a viable alternative to customers' internal storage deployment, we expect those gateway products will continue to have their value, such as boosting performance, increasing storage efficiency simplifying management. Gartner expects the gateway market to exp, enable accelerate the acceptance of external. Market Analysis External gateways are peripherals to external services. The gateways' future, therefore, is very much dependent on the success of overall external services, as well as on reliable products from solid vendors. For enterprise customers, gateways are an Gartner, Inc. G Page 3 of 10

4 essential component of solution, as they can help overcome some key issues associated with external such as performance. While public offers potential cost agility advantages, which fit the need for consumers ad hoc projects such as test development, they may frequently suffer from lower security, weaker SLAs, looser integration with on-site applications, lower reliability. The lack of transparency in storage architecture data protection schemes deployed by some major public service providers does not help generate confidence among business customers who want to develop tighter deeper long-term relationships. In contrast, external private clouds tend to have higher-cost storage infrastructure because they often acquire commercial storage systems instead of building their own infrastructure. However, their strengths may include stronger SLAs, deeper integration with on-site applications higher levels of reliability security can often justify the higher cost. Because they deploy commercial products, whose features functions are more readily available, business customers with internal storage know-how may feel more comfortable about leveraging external to gain the benefits of agility, such as global data accessibility, without internal private infrastructure, outsourced management of backup disaster recovery, potentially lower total cost of ownership. Overall, all hybrid storage appliances those gateways with internal storage for local cache or primary storage can offer predictable performance operations for local users, in some cases, can replace on-premises disk arrays. However, some gateways are designed to alleviate some of the pain points associated with using public specifically. For example, support of simultaneous access to more than one public cloud, cloud clones, encryption of data in flight at rest will increase the data availability, recoverability security in the public cloud. These gateways are typically offered by startups. Other gateways are created by vendors that want to use the gateway as a facilitator to increase their storage platform sales to the external private cloud service providers. For example, EMC's F5's appliances have been around for many years to provide user-transparent file migration among different local tiers of storage have recently been retrofitted with access protocols such as REST. They lack some cloud-focused features such as deduplication, WAN optimization cloud cloning. They may or may not be able to preserve the native deduplication on the local storage systems when they move data to the cloud. Key Vendors Products in the Market Although we segment external gateway devices into three architectural categories based on some key attributes, every single one is designed somewhat differently. Those designed from the ground up for public are typically from startups, including Nasuni, StorSimple TwinStrata; whereas startups CTERA Panzura focus more on providing infrastructure technologies for hybrid cloud private cloud service providers. Established vendors such as EMC Hitachi aim to protect their own turf by offering gateways to augment their respective cloud infrastructure storage platforms Atmos Hitachi Content Platform (HCP). Riverbed is leveraging its WAN optimization know-how to enter a new market. Table 1 groups the vendors products by the three categories lists some of the key feature functions as a reference for users who plan to adopt external. Page 4 of 10 Gartner, Inc. G

5 Table 1. External Cloud Gateways Comparison, 2011 Company/ Product Cloud Services APIs OS/Apps Supported Encryption Policy to the Cloud Architecture Client- Side Protocols Dedup-lication/ Compres-sion WAN Optimi-zation Snapshots/ Cloning in the Cloud Gateway Storage Details CTERA/ Cloud Attached Storage Cloud Portal Copy/ synch Hybrid that supports CTERA Portal, which can further connect to public CIFS, NFS, iscsi Microsoft Exchange, SQL, Active Directory SharePoint AES-256 encryption, SHA-1 fingerprint File metadata-based policy Block-level dedupe, which can be applied across multiple appliances/ sites; compression ratio between 2x 20x Leverage dedupe; only change delta sent to the cloud Snapshots can be stored both locally in the cloud; portal storage nodes can be cloned for HA 2-8 SATA drives, delivering thinprovi-sioned storage for data metadata Panzura Copy/ synch Hybrid (REST or SOAP Rsync over SSH, NFS), which can further connect to public etc. NFS/ CIFS, iscsi or MS SQL API, VTL/ NDMP to interface tape or disk backup software MS Share- Point SQL; Symantec NetBackup or backup scripts Yes (RSA-2048 AES-256 Replication policies between nodes or between a node one or more public cloud provider; can go down to directory-level granularity Live, local or global block dedupe dictionary part of metadata; compres-sion ratio: up to 95% Only the data change delta is exchanged across controllers; where possible, multiple TCP sessions are used in parallel to reduce the latency effects. Policybased at directory level; cloning is at directory or file level; metadata are sent to all controllers for synchronization; data are mountable from multiple locations. HDDs (8TB 24TB) or SSDs or both; RAID 10 Gartner, Inc. G Page 5 of 10

6 Hitachi/ HDI Cache Private cloud based on Hitachi Content Platform CIFS, NFS CIFS/NFS files No (HCP offers encryption for data at rest) All copied to cloud No (HCP in the cloud has single instance store compression) Yes (via partnership with Silver Peak) No local or SAN attached; store cloud replicated files cloud archived stubs Nasuni/ Filer Cache Public, such as Amazon S3, EMC Atmos, Microsoft Windows Azure Storage, Nirvanix, Rackspace, etc. CIFS NFS Any that work with CIFS/ NFS On-premises encryption with OpenPGP/ AES-256 Can set cache size, schedule the frequency retention periods of (unlimited), volume quotas Subfile based dedupe; average 30% (up to 90%) space savings Only change delta at subfile level between snapshot intervals is sent to the cloud after being compressed File system snapshot hourly by default sent to the cloud; customer can restore to any point in the life of a file, directory or file system. Software installed on a virtual server, emulating Windows file server; caches both data metadata with local storage attached to the virtual server; can also cache. Riverbed/ Whitewater Cache Public such as Amazon S3 EMC Atmos, etc. CIFS, NFS Backup target for NetBackup, Backup Exec, TSM, NetWorker, Vizioncore CA ARCserve User existing solution Use thirdparty backup software policy Subblock granular (to 16 bytes) dedupe; can be applied across volumes; patented algorithm used by Steelhead; compression ratio: 20-30x Transactionally aware, parallel cloud object store: reduce latency for REST API No not used for primary data Unified RAM HDD cache (7TB or 11TB raw); RAID 6 Page 6 of 10 Gartner, Inc. G

7 TwinStrata Cache Public, such as Amazon S3, as well as cloud storage based on EMC AtmosScality Ring, MezeoCloud, etc. iscsi All apps collaboration (Exchange, VMware), backup/dr (Backup Exec, CA ARCserve) Yes (AES-256) Can set policy on local cache cloud provider parameters No dedupe; Gzip compatible No In-cloud triggered by users Cloud volume is partially cached locally; cloud replica is 100% cached locally via async replication. Dynamic adaptive caching EMC/ Cloud Tiering Appliance Tiered CIFS, NFS CIFS/NFS files No Public or private based on EMC Atmos Schedulable migration policy Compressed files stay compressed in different tiers No No, cannot send local to the cloud Appli-ances do not store or cache data, but store metadata; can run on VMs F5/ARX Cloud Extender Tiered CIFS CIFS files Yes (AES-256) Public or private based on EMC Atmos, NetApp StorageGRID Schedulable migration policy No (deduped files will be hydrated before sending to the cloud) No No, cannot send local to the cloud Software runs on a Windows file server, with local storage caching metadata for files sent to the cloud; supports virtual server HA or physical server clustering Gartner, Inc. G Page 7 of 10

8 StorSimple Tiered Public such as Amazon S3 Windows Azure based on EMC Atmos iscsi VMware 3.5/4.0/4.1, Hyper-V, Windows Server 2008 R2 User existing encryption solution or StorSimple's encryption with AES-256 Automatically moves data across SSD, SAS cloud tiers based on access frequency age; transaction log vols. are treated with higher priority. Users can also provide explicit priorities. Subblock-level dedupe with variable-width chunk ID; can dedupe across volumes; compression ratio: 4-5x for primary data, 10-20x for backup data Besides dedupe compression, uses negotiated TCP optimization parallel-ization Local are auto tiered; cloud are used for fast online restore; cloud clones function like offsite encrypted tape: can be cloned mounted by any Stor- Simple device using the same service account SSDs SAS drives for local primary storage with auto tiering HA; capacity from 10TB to 200TB AES = Advanced Encryption Stard; HA = high availability; HDD = hard-disk drive; SAN = storage area network; SATA = Serial Advanced Technology Attachment; VM = virtual machine Source: Gartner (August 2011) Page 8 of 10 Gartner, Inc. G

9 Recommended Reading Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription. "Competitive Lscape: Hybrid Storage Appliances, Gateway to Public Cloud" "Case Study: Reducing the Storage Cost via the Public Cloud" "Cloud Storage Gateways: Bridge the Gap" Gartner, Inc. G Page 9 of 10

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