Is Cloud-Based Storage Right for Your Company?

Transcription

1 VIRTUALIZATION CLOUD APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT HEALTH IT NETWORKING STORAGE ARCHITECTURE DATA CENTER MANAGEMENT BI/APPLICATIONS DISASTER RECOVERY/COMPLIANCE SECURITY Handbook 1EDITOR S NOTE Is Right for Your Company? 2CLOUD-BASED BACKUP: GAIN WITHOUT PAIN Cloud-based backup is becoming a viable, cost-effective alternative to backing up data on-site. But it s not right for every company. 3THE PROS AND CONS OF CLOUD-BASED STORAGE 4DISASTER RECOVERY WITH CLOUD STORAGE

2 1 EDITOR S NOTE Becomes a Compelling Option Cloud As companies look for ways to reduce costs and improve data center management, cloud-based storage has become a compelling option. It offers companies the potential to reduce the costs of traditional disk- or tape-based backup. It also affords benefits in terms of easy access to scalable storage resources and more up-to-date backups. But as with most technologies, cloud-based storage is hardly for every company. In fact, smaller companies with fewer resources are realizing more cost benefits of cloud storage today, as Alan Earls discusses. Next, Rick Cook explores some of the pros and cons of cloud-based storage models and notes that these models can help boost security and flexibility, but they pose tradeoffs in terms of control, latency and bandwidth concerns. And finally, Brian Knudtson explores how a cloud-based storage model greatly enhances a disaster recovery strategy: You have your data off-site if a disaster befalls your primary location, and you can greatly reduce the costs associated with redundant hardware for a backup site. This series of articles is designed to give you a more detailed view of how cloud-based backup can work in your environment or when it might not. n Lauren Horwitz Executive Editor Data Center and Virtualization Group 2 IS CLOUD-BASED STORAGE RIGHT FOR YOUR COMPANY?

3 2WHY USE CLOUD BACKUP? with Little Pain Cloud Cloud-based backup is gaining traction for companies seeking greater flexibility in managing their backups. But the cost benefits may not accrue for every company. According to TechTarget s early-2013 Tech- Target Cloud Pulse Survey, 56% of cloud storage users are cloud data backup subscribers; backup ranks as the most popular cloud storage option. And, according to an IDC report, data backup/archiving ranked as the function most suitable for private and hybrid clouds and the second most suitable for public clouds. Industry observers say that companies benefitting most from cloud-based backup may be those with smaller environments, with less data to back up. And, of course, companies of all sizes can confront roadblocks, such as bandwidth limitations, with the backup approach. Still, experts say, cloud-based backup can solve more problems in terms of cost and management than it creates. CLOUD-BASED STORAGE AND COST Mark A. Gilmore, president and co-founder of Wired Integrations, a technology consulting firm in Silicon Valley, said organizations now use cloud-based storage because of the convenience and reduced cost; on-site storage with disk-to-disk or tape-to-disk is expensive compared with the cloud. And he highlighted a key advantage of cloud storage: scalability. The companies we see benefiting most are ones with less than 2 TB to 3 TB of data. Other companies with larger implementations can benefit as well, just not as much given the cost of increasing the Internet pipe to handle the outbound transfer of data, he said. In keeping with that large-small adoption split, Gilmore said so far most of the implementations he has seen have been singleprovider installations. We recommend never putting anything in the cloud you cannot afford to be without. When backing up to the cloud, 3 IS CLOUD-BASED STORAGE RIGHT FOR YOUR COMPANY?

4 2WHY USE CLOUD BACKUP? Cloud you should always have at least one local copy of the same data. Even if that copy is not as current as the backup, it should be something close. Some vendors are using a disk-to-disk-to-cloud model for that purpose, Gilmore noted. It s great as long as you can get the vendor to provide the local storage as part of the overall cost of the solution. Mike Valuck, a senior consultant at Glass- House Technologies, said even larger companies with runaway data growth are moving to the cloud. Some of them are running out of storage faster than they can buy and install it, he said. Also, demand can be bursty, which makes planning and procurement especially difficult. Then, when you throw in the cost of operating and managing storage, cloud starts to look more appealing, Valuck said. On the other side of the ledger, Valuck said, cloud demands bandwidth, particularly for a restore. Users might end up waiting hours or longer. In fact, Valuck said that organizations considering cloud computing should plan to tier data. Then the most critical information is also backed up on-site in a readily accessible form. From a business perspective, some organizations are drawn to cloud computing because it s easier to get operational funding than to get capital funding. If you can t afford to buy a new system from EMC, it is much easier to move to an Opex model and then just pay as you go, he said. Some [companies] are running out of storage faster than they can buy and install it. mike valuck, senior consultant, GlassHouse Technologies For Syd Weinstein, chief technology officer at PeopleMetrics, a customer experience and market research consultancy, the pay-as-yougo model was appealing. If your company is large and has huge amounts of data, it may not be the way to go, he said. For a smaller organization, pay as you go might be ideal. I back up 100 gigabytes a day, and I pay only a few hundred dollars a year, Weinstein said. 4 IS CLOUD-BASED STORAGE RIGHT FOR YOUR COMPANY?

5 2WHY USE CLOUD BACKUP? Cloud CLOUD-BASED BACKUP AND FLEXIBILITY For Weinstein, cloud computing provides greater flexibility in the ability to access data from anywhere. It also enables his business to quickly move data off-site and have it automatically backed up in a way that s simpler than with traditional tools, such as tape. It used to be that you called Iron Mountain to pick up your tapes. If you needed them back, it might take a day or two, he said. From a management standpoint, the best thing about cloud is you can back up files on any kind of schedule. Slower-turning things can be backed up less frequently, and things that change more often can be backed up more frequently, Weinstein said. In his experience, reliability hasn t been a problem. Weinstein said most of the service providers he has encountered simply resell Amazon Web Services. A few use Google s service, and a handful sell their own native offering. He says his company chose a provider that charges for total storage volume, but not for transfers. And with cloud backup, he pointed out, Compression is your friend. Weinstein s company does its own encryption rather than relying on a provider. The only people who have our key are our agents on the server and ourselves, so it is very secure, he said. As far as service-level agreements (SLAs), Weinstein acknowledges most companies won t have a lot of negotiating clout to get to specific performance and response goals. Most of the time, it is pretty much a shrink-wrapped contract that guarantees a certain percentage of access to data and a certain amount of bandwidth, he said. For the most part, Weinstein said, his experience has been positive. Since most of the providers use Amazon or Google, which are hugely redundant and dispersed, they are very reliable. The best thing about cloud is you can back up files on any... schedule. syd weinstein, CTO, PeopleMetrics 5 IS CLOUD-BASED STORAGE RIGHT FOR YOUR COMPANY?

6 2WHY USE CLOUD BACKUP? Gilmore said security and management should be deciding factors in moving to the cloud. Don t make the move, he advised, until a service provider proves itself to be trustworthy. Get a copy of their data center audit reports. If they don t have one, don t use them, he said. And, he said, any cloud provider should have current SSAE 16 Type 2 audit certification. Finally, Gilmore recommends getting acquainted with a provider s service-level agreements. SLAs are far and away my favorite part of the cloud, and that is because at least 80% of the cloud service providers still don t use them. That means diligence is crucial, he said. What happens if they go away? How is your backup data disposed of? You need answers to these types of questions, and only a valid SLA will get you that, Gilmore said. Other than the bandwidth squeeze, which makes large restores problematic, cloud backup works for most kinds of organizations. Large enterprises, which are already staffed and equipped for backup challenges, may not find the economics all that compelling. Smaller organizations, however, will gravitate toward the flexibility and ease of cloud backup. Alan R. Earls Cloud 6 IS CLOUD-BASED STORAGE RIGHT FOR YOUR COMPANY?

7 3 PROS AND CONS Weighing the Pros and Cons of Cloud Data Services Cloud Although cloud data storage is gaining popularity, many companies still haven t jumped on the bandwagon. In fact, a recent Forrester Research survey found that 86% of those surveyed had no plans for hosted cloud data storage and only about 10% have implemented it or plan to do so over the next year. Part of the reason that cloud storage has been slow to catch on is its newness. Further, many potential users have questions about the cost and the technology itself. Cloud data storage is available from a variety of vendors, including Amazon Simple Service (S3), Iron Mountain Inc. and Nirvanix Inc. Some companies, such as Amazon S3, target small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Others, such as Nirvanix, target larger users. THE ADVANTAGES OF CLOUD-BASED STORAGE The advantages will be most apparent in SMB environments, since they have lower capital budgets and fewer trained IT staff. Some of the attributes of cloud data storage for SMBs include the following: Cloud storage is convenient. Most, but not all, of the tasks associated with storage maintenance become someone else s problem, because the data is stored off-site. It s low maintenance. After setup, the user is responsible for almost no maintenance. You need to manage user accounts, but jobs like array maintenance and monitoring the health of data storage simply go away. It s easily expandable. Provisioning more storage can be as simple as making a phone call. That means you ll need a lot less excess capacity in your data storage system because you can increase your storage so quickly. 7 IS CLOUD-BASED STORAGE RIGHT FOR YOUR COMPANY?

8 3 PROS AND CONS Cloud Security. If cloud storage is set up properly, it is just as secure as storing data on your own servers. at a remote site in the cloud avoids problems with a local disaster such as a fire, flood or criminal wiping out your stored data. This assumes reasonable precautions all around. Cloud storage providers should use secure communications links such as Secure Shell, and data should be encrypted when stored. You need to ensure that passwords and access are secure on your end. At the same time, cloud storage does not eliminate the need for data backups or for disaster recovery. CLOUD STORAGE CONCERNS The disadvantages of cloud data storage for SMBs are as follows: Cloud storage may not be cost-effective. Whether the model is cost-effective is individual to each organization. For some companies, the cost of cloud storage is less than the cost of storage capacity, plus management, plus all the other costs that go with data storage. As a guide, the smaller the business and the less storage needed, the more likely that cloud storage will be cost-effective. Small businesses have fewer resources to devote to IT and generally fewer storage needs. Still, even for small businesses, cost-effectiveness isn t always a given. When considering costs, make an applesto-apples comparison. Include all the costs of maintaining your own storage (the cost of the equipment, managing it and backing it up) and compare with all the costs of using cloud storage (the full cost of the storage, the extras that go with it and the cost of bandwidth to support storage to the cloud). Control. Sending some data storage to the cloud means ceding control. Because cloud storage depends on an outside service for a critical business function, this makes many IT professionals nervous. Nevertheless, one can argue that data storage can be better managed with higher availability than is possible to achieve from 8 IS CLOUD-BASED STORAGE RIGHT FOR YOUR COMPANY?

9 3 PROS AND CONS Cloud in-house storage. But whether that adds to a user s comfort level is another story. In addition to negotiating a solid servicelevel agreement, check a cloud provider s references because in such a new field there are few well-established vendors. Latency. Unlike cloud data backup, latency becomes a critical issue with cloud storage, especially for applications that are storageactive, such as online transaction processing. Making the connection between the user and the stored object is going to take additional time. Network latency is a factor, as is the time needed to negotiate the service provider s security system. How much of a problem this is depends on individual circumstances and user needs. Some users will find that it gets in the way of productivity; others will not. Bandwidth. Like any other remote application, cloud storage takes wide area network bandwidth. To make it work, you need enough capacity to transmit files back and forth between your location and your storage provider. If you don t have enough bandwidth, you have to add telecommunications capacity. That adds to the total cost of cloud storage. How much bandwidth is enough to support your system depends on the amount of storage traffic your system generates. Your storage service provider should give you answers based on its specific setup and an analysis of your storage traffic. IS CLOUD DATA STORAGE WORTH IT? When deciding whether cloud storage is right for your business, examine your storage needs and test the technology to ensure that cloud data storage is a good fit. Fortunately, cloud storage is easy to try because of the nature of as a Service and the lack of capital investment. Rick Cook 9 IS CLOUD-BASED STORAGE RIGHT FOR YOUR COMPANY?

10 4 DR AND CLOUD STORAGE Cloud Protecting your compute environment by hosting it in the cloud can dramatically reduce costs and simplify disaster recovery (DR) planning. Many IT shops rely on tape-based backups as part of their DR strategy, but they neglect to think about where they will restore these backups during a data center disaster. This major planning gap usually boils down to the prohibitive cost of operating a complete second infrastructure and a failure to prioritize DR planning. Businesses with a physical DR operating environment must either build and maintain a second data center or negotiate leased space in a colocation facility. VMware shops running Site Recovery Manager (SRM) benefit from fully automated site recovery and migration in the event of a data center disaster, but the physical backup data center is still costly and potentially poorly managed. One DR choice can alleviate these concerns: cloud-based DR. It s not necessarily a cure-all, but it can offer many benefits for underprepared businesses. THE UPSIDES OF DISASTER RECOVERY IN THE CLOUD In a cloud-based DR strategy, it is often easier to move data to the cloud than to move IT hardware to a new location. The task is as easy as negotiating with a new cloud provider and migrating the data. If a public cloud provider hosts your disaster recovery environment, you can drop the acquisition and maintenance costs for redundant server, network and storage hardware. This strategy avoids negotiating storage array prices, refreshing servers every three to five years and calling support lines to solve problems, such as a bad switch port. It also relieves the overhead 10 IS CLOUD-BASED STORAGE RIGHT FOR YOUR COMPANY?

11 4 DR AND CLOUD STORAGE of maintaining firmware and renewing support for each device. In some cases, you can bypass the additional work of software licensing. In the event of a regional disaster, cloudbased DR enables an organization to restore in a different part of the country or world. A company in Florida may want to have its data center operations nearby, but, when a hurricane strikes, the ability to restore virtual machines (VMs) in a cloud hosted in Iowa could mean continuing IT business as usual. requirements, businesses should incorporate VMware Site Recovery Manager, or a similar product, into their disaster recovery plans. That added automation tool can speed data recovery times over manual processes, so you If a business doesn t trust a public cloud provider to run its production workloads, should it trust that provider with the same workloads in a di saster situation? Cloud THE DOWNSIDES OF DISASTER RECOVERY IN THE CLOUD Of course, there are disadvantages to cloudbased DR. Security is one of the main hesitations for moving DR to public clouds. If a business doesn t trust a public cloud provider to run its production workloads, should it trust that provider with the same workloads in a disaster situation? IT professionals may perceive the risk of a public cloud environment as acceptable during a temporary emergency. When VMs have low recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) meet those RPO and RTO goals. The replication features built into SRM enable Recovery as a Service, copying changed blocks of VM data without storage lock-in. VMware vcloud Director enables IT shops to create virtual data centers quickly and easily. SRM 5.1 and VMware vcloud Director 5.1 have little integration with one another, however. SRM can be used to fail VMs into the virtual environment but won t add them into vcloud Director. If you re handy enough at scripting, you can make SRM and vcloud Director 11 IS CLOUD-BASED STORAGE RIGHT FOR YOUR COMPANY?

12 4 DR AND CLOUD STORAGE cooperate, but they won t on their own. This makes failing VMs into the vcloud Director environment via SRM a limited option. However, some cloud service providers offer DR to cloud services, using VMware vsphere 5 and SRM. Few IT infrastructures are 100% virtualized, so physical machines will be part of most organizations DR plans. Cloud environments rely heavily on virtualization, so they have little to offer the physical machine victims of a site failure. If the cloud provider has a traditional colocation business, additional planning and possibly additional contracts may secure protection for physical servers. While many organizations do not consider public cloud computing a viable production infrastructure option, others are considering a cloud-based disaster recovery scenario. The cost savings and ease of implementation make cloud attractive to businesses of all sizes. Brian Knudtson Cloud 12 IS CLOUD-BASED STORAGE RIGHT FOR YOUR COMPANY?

13 ABOUT THE AUTHORS ALAN R. EARLS is a Boston-area freelance writer focused on business and technology. Cloud RICK COOK specializes in issues related to storage and storage management. BRIAN KNUDTSON is a solutions architect for a large Midwestern enterprise technology provider with more than a decade of IT experience. is a SearchCloudComputing.com e-publication. Margie Semilof Editorial Director Lauren Horwitz Executive Editor Phil Sweeney Managing Editor Eugene Demaitre Associate Managing Editor Laura Aberle Associate Features Editor Linda Koury Director of Online Design Neva Maniscalco Graphic Designer Rebecca Kitchens Publisher rkitchens@techtarget.com TechTarget 275 Grove Street, Newton, MA TechTarget Inc. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. TechTarget reprints are available through The YGS Group. About TechTarget: TechTarget publishes media for information technology professionals. More than 100 focused websites enable quick access to a deep store of news, advice and analysis about the technologies, products and processes crucial to your job. Our live and virtual events give you direct access to independent expert commentary and advice. At IT Knowledge Exchange, our social community, you can get advice and share solutions with peers and experts. 13 IS CLOUD-BASED STORAGE RIGHT FOR YOUR COMPANY?