Amazon Web Services and Maginatics Solution Brief

Transcription

1 Amazon Web Services and Maginatics Solution Brief Today, enterprise IT organizations are faced with unprecedented challenges when it comes to storing unstructured data both cost-effectively and securely while making it available when and where it is needed. Rapidly growing volumes of unstructured data create massive data storage challenges within the enterprise (office documents, images, videos, CAD files, etc.) that have resulted in increasing storage costs. The security challenge is compounded by distributed organizations with numerous branch offices, the prevalence of insecure data protection technologies, and the ubiquity of mobile devices. When these challenges are combined with the increasing trend for enterprise workers to operate from home or any location that is not their traditional office, it becomes apparent that a new data management challenge is upon us. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers cloud storage capabilities with Amazon S3, enabling high scalability, data durability, agility, and low total cost of ownership. Combining Amazon S3 s scale, durability, and cost benefits with the software-only Maginatics Cloud Storage Platform eliminates the capital expenditures and IT overhead inherent in traditional, monolithic, storage solutions. Maginatics Cloud Storage Platform Key Benefits Reduce time to deployment by utilizing AWS EC2 & S3, for a software-only solution. Securely access files from any device, anywhere. Each endpoint acts as a secure cache. Users and applications can continue to use traditional file system interfaces. Endpoint agents abstract latency: Multi-platform clients (e.g. Windows, Linux, Mac, ios, Android, Web Browsers). Multi-layer adaptive caching. Windows/POSIX compliant. Global: Namespace, deduplication, file locking. Hot-Standby - Failover to standby resources with a single-click. Snapshots - Easily recover files without involving IT resources. Improved productivity via remote access to centralized data.

2 The Problem Amazon Web Services (AWS), with Amazon S3, provides simple, low-cost storage that is highly resilient, yet easy to scale and manage. Despite the indisputable advantages of adopting cloud storage, enterprises considering this wise move face four major obstacles: 1. The vast majority of applications that enterprises run today will continue to run for years to come and leverage traditional file system interfaces (CIFS / NFS). Traditional file-based storage systems typically perform poorly over vast distances and these protocols have no native ability to address cloud storage. This places enterprises in the untenable position of having to refactor applications that represent decades of investment and development effort. To fully leverage cloud storage, users need a solution that bridges the mismatch between cloud and application protocols enabling existing, unmodified applications to run seamlessly against data stored in the cloud. 2. Cloud storage was not designed to present data to the enterprise edge or to ensure end-to-end data security and fast data access over distance as demanded by end-users. The solution that can bridge the protocol gap must also enable widely distributed users and teams to access cloudresident data with enterprise-grade security and high performance. 3. Traditional data protection strategies often prove to be insecure and unreliable. Multiple copies of data are sent into different silos of management and media types creating operational complexity and data compliance concerns. The solution must have embedded data protection capabilities that do not rely on traditional or third-party technologies. 4. The cloud is the foundation of the softwaredefined enterprise. The solution that enables enterprise adoption of cloud storage must also fit squarely into the software-defined paradigm: a software-only architecture with no reliance on hardware appliances that invariably present bottlenecks, no reliance on the human middleware of distributed IT teams, and the elimination of forklift upgrades in order to scale.

3 The Solution: Redefining Enterprise Storage with a Software-defined Object Storage Platform Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides a simple web-services interface and can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives customers access to the same highly scalable, reliable, secure, fast, inexpensive infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The Maginatics Cloud Storage Platform or MCSP, combined with Amazon S3 object storage, knocks down the obstacles to enterprise adoption of cloud storage by solving all of the challenges outlined above. With Amazon S3 forming the foundation of the solution, customers are assured the highest levels of data integrity and durability, on-demand scalability and agility all at the speed of a mouse click. Moreover, these benefits are delivered without the overhead of building, managing, or maintaining a physical IT infrastructure, all of which is provided as a service by AWS. Amazon Web Services Key Benefits 99.99% availability of objects over a given year. Repeated price drops. Designed to sustain the concurrent loss of data in two facilities. Scale on-demand and pay only for the capacity you use. Eliminates the need to perform expensive, time-consuming, and risky hardware migrations. Amazon S3 acts as a highly durable, geographically distributed storage backend for the Maginatics Cloud Storage Platform. MCSP provides a virtual filer called the Maginatics Virtual Filer (MVF). MVF enables applications that read and write via traditional file interfaces to leverage Amazon S3 as primary storage, bridging the divide between cloud and traditional applications. This preserves the investments made over the last thirty years in file-based applications. Moreover, MVF preserves native file system semantics for both Windows and POSIX environments, all the while delivering enterprise-essential attributes. In addition, MVF provides a global namespace, global deduplication, and failsafe file locking that includes lock management across geographically-dispersed users and locations. With MCSP and Amazon S3, organizations can reap the benefits of a next generation virtual filer, backed by a highly durable and geographically distributed cloud storage backend without having to modify existing applications, toolsets or workflows. MCSP employs native software agents on each endpoint device that enables access to cloud-resident data with equally failsafe, in-flight and at-rest security and high performance. These software agents

4 accomplish much of the heavy lifting in the system; performing file segmentation and re-assembly, encryption/decryption, multi-tiered adaptive caching, and a wide-range of WAN optimization techniques including global in-line deduplication. Designed and optimized from the ground up for both cloud storage and edge connectivity, MCSP extends the benefits of NAS and cloud storage across an entire distributed organization in an all-software form factor. Driving the Software-Defined Enterprise A solution based on MCSP and AWS can be rapidly deployed in enterprise production environments with small incremental time costs for additional scale. The combination of MCSP and AWS produces powerful benefits in the areas of cost, agility and productivity. Figure 1: Maginatics Cloud Storage Platform deployed on AWS S3

5 Our customers typically deploy our solution to address one of two fundamental use cases: 1. Elastic NAS. This encapsulates parallel workloads that require access to a shared data set and can scale up and down rapidly, often without much advance warning, necessitating a highly elastic capacity pool. Many of these workloads are also transient, with lifecycles far shorter than traditional hardware amortization schedules. Examples include web farms, media applications such as batch rendering, and life sciences workloads such as multi-step genomic analysis. The combination of Amazon S3 for storage, AWS EC2 for compute, and Maginatics as the scale-out, global namespace virtual filer can vastly cut costs, reduce or eliminate the need for IT oversight, increase performance, eliminate reconfiguration downtime, and shorten time to service. 2. NAS Consolidation. Distributed organizations with de-centralized and dispersed data stores can consolidate their data in Amazon S3 while simultaneously ensuring that the data is efficiently and securely available anywhere, on any-device. MCSP offers multi-tier adaptive caching capabilities. Multi-tier caching accelerates access times at several points along the pathway from the end user to the cloud storage backend: at the endpoint, at the branch office site, at the CDN with native integration with AWS CloudFront for geographic regional caching, and at the cloud storage system itself. Critically, caching at every stage must not compromise data security in-flight or at rest. These caching tiers provide fast access to data regardless of an end-user s location. To top it off, MCSP offers least latent routing on all GETs and PUTs to multiregion, multi-bucket Amazon S3 accounts all under a single namespace. Other key AWS features and services can also be integrated with MCSP which benefits an organization and makes the move to the cloud today more transparent and compelling. The business case for adoption of cloud storage by enterprises, particularly when the Amazon Web Services provides it as a service, is unassailable. By addressing the need among large organizations for seamless application compatibility, fast and secure edge connectivity and a purely software-defined form factor, the Maginatics Cloud Storage Platform forms the perfect complement to Amazon Web Services and enables these organizations to reap the full benefits of the cloud today while simultaneously enhancing data access, collaborative capabilities, workforce productivity and competitive advantage enterprise-wide.