HiTech. White Paper. Storage-as-a-Service. SAN and NAS Reference Architectures leveraging Private Cloud Storage

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1 HiTech White Paper -as-a-service SAN and NAS Reference Architectures leveraging Private Cloud

2 About the Author Ankur Srivastava Ankur Srivastava is a Solution Architect working with the Hi Tech Industry Solution Unit (ISU) of TCS. His main areas of focus are, Database and ization. He has close to nine years of experience as a technologist, delivering solutions across technology stacks covering storage, servers, databases and applications. Ankur holds a Bachelor of Technology (B. Tech) degree in Computer Science and Engineering and is also a NetApp Certified Implementation Engineer (NCIE).

3 Increasingly organizations are encountering escalated storage costs primarily due to data overflow and the need to adhere to multiple regulatory compliance guidelines. They face the challenge of identifying the storage consumption within business units and that of reducing unnecessary data storage consumption through an automated storage resource pool. Additionally, implementing a pay-per-use model within the different business units ensures optimum and cost-effective use of available storage resources. There has also been a growing demand for external file sharing services within the enterprise environment. However, the security challenges associated with storing data 'out-of-premise' in a service provider environment cannot be ruled out. This paper provides reference architecture to implement private cloud storage within the enterprise environment to ensure that all the storage related requirements can be addressed through a common storage resource pool. The storage is provisioned automatically to the business units without any manual intervention and through a self-service catalog that addresses the specific needs of the business unit. The reference architecture also provides a mechanism to implement a pay-per-use consumer style file sharing services without compromising on data security.

4 Contents Introduction 5 -As-A-Service 5 Introduction to Private Cloud 5 Private Cloud Framework 7 Reference Architecture for SAN St-aaS 8 Reference Architecture for NAS St-aaS 9 Conclusion 10 References 10

5 Introduction Data management has always been a challenge for organizations, especially large ones. This challenge has got exacerbated in recent years due to proliferation of data from mergers and acquisitions and reduced time to market. The data storage demand forecast for an organization typically includes parameters such as new employee acquisitions, expected customer orders and regulatory requirements among others. However, the demand forecast is usually inflated because data is calculated in silos by different business units (BU) within the organization. optimization techniques such as thin provisioning and de-duplication can allocate only a fraction of the overall storage requested by a BU. While this is a very effective technique to address the under-utilization of storage, it poses a challenge when the sudden surge in requirement exceeds the amount of space allocated to the BU. These challenges call for a scalable cloud storage that can be automatically provisioned and un-provisioned on-demand with no disruption and provide a multi-tenant environment to host different BUs securely. There is an additional dimension to the overall scalable cloud storage environment. Although a shared drive from a centralized storage controller meets the day-to-day business requirements for the enterprise, this does not address the mobility requirements for the end users that need file sharing technology to share the data across different end-client devices. Organizations are wary of allowing public cloud storage solutions for file sharing due to security reasons.. Organizations want to retain control over the data with an in-premise private cloud storage solution that can address the data sharing and mobility requirements of the end-user without any data security risks. -As-A-Service Private Cloud Private cloud storage is an infrastructure pre-requisite to deliver a truly automated storage-as-a-service (St-aaS) model. Private cloud storage is not always defined correctly and is often misunderstood as a process of delivering storage on-demand with pay-per-use costing. However, automation is a key component of private cloud storage where pools of virtualized storage infrastructure can be provisioned and un-provisioned on demand with minimal user intervention. Additionally, there are few key characteristics of private cloud storage such as on-demand access, shared resource pool and elastic access to resources through a simplified management platform. 5

6 The private cloud storage needs to be auto-scalable both vertically and horizontally. The storage environments are typically scalable vertically, where it is possible to meet additional storage requirements by adding more disk shelves to the storage controllers. However, the vertical scalability is limited by the scalability of the storage controller. The need for a cloud-based storage is an ability to scale horizontally with the changing storage capacity and workload requirements. The horizontal scaling at the storage layer is handled by the clustered storage systems that allow non-disruptive introduction of additional storage controller nodes under the same namespace. Another key feature of cloud storage is secure multi-tenancy (SMT). SMT enables sharing of the storage resources among multiple storage tenants (such as BUs) securely. An important benefit of SMT is the ability to host multiple segregated BUs or customers on the same storage infrastructure resulting in a higher storage utilization and cost-effective implementation. An important ability of private cloud storage is the storage utilization metering and chargeback for the amount of storage being used. In cases of block-based storage allocated to applications, the metering and chargeback can be based on the amount of average Input/output (IO) generated or consumed by the application. For a file-based Network Attached (NAS) environment, the chargeback can be simply based on the storage capacity being allocated to the storage controller. Private cloud storage should be manageable from a single centralized console that can provide the option to self-service the storage resource requests. A self-service portal with service catalogs enables efficient allocation and provisioning of storage resources on demand. The service catalog can be based on: n The performance tiers to suit the specific IO demands of the application that will be hosted on private cloud storage. n A specific data protection level for the storage space provided (disk-to-disk backups, replication schedules, and so on). n Block-based vs file-based storage requirement that can be addressed through Area Network (SAN) or Network Attached (NAS) technologies respectively. 6

7 Private Cloud Framework In order to realize economies of scale, private cloud storage should be based on standardized service catalogs and specific service offerings to reduce the level of customization-introduced complexities and to simplify the overall management and efficiency of the storage infrastructure. The framework should ideally be based on the storage attributes that are most important and customizable based on the requirements. Mission Critical Applications Business Critical Applications Dev/Test Environments Small File Shares (< 1 GB) Medium File Shares (1GB 5 GB) Large File Shares (5 GB 10 GB) STORAGE SERVICE CATALOG STORAGE ORCHESTRATION AUTOMATION & CHARGEBACK Real-time 15 minutes 2 hours 4 hours DATA PROTECTION POLICIES Disk-to-disk Backup with sync replication to DR site Disk-to-disk Backup with sync replication to DR site Disk-to-disk backup In-system snapshot DATA PROTECTION STRATEGY BLOCK STORAGE Volumes FILE STORAGE SSD Disk Pools SAS Disk Pools SATA Disk Pools STORAGE SYSTEM Figure : Private Cloud Framework for St-aaS This suggested framework (Figure 1) provides a guideline to implement St-aaS offering for enterprise environments. The overall suggested St-aaS framework should include: 1. A physical storage pool composed of disks or virtual volumes in storage system. 2. A data provisioning strategy which defines the policy of allocating and provisioning storage to the target system. 3. A data protection strategy and policy which define the backup and replication policies for effective data protection. 7

8 4. A cloud storage chargeback that has the ability to meter the amount of storage utilized. 5. A storage service catalog that can be operated by end-users to utilize the services published in the catalog. Reference Architecture for SAN St-aaS The reference architecture for SAN-based St-aaS leverages the storage environment to providing a secure multi-tenant environment through storage virtualization technology [1]. This allows multiple BUs to be hosted on the same shared storage system. The virtual infrastructure is managed and controlled through a virtual infrastructure orchestrator server and the storage layer orchestration is implemented through Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) vendor-specific storage orchestrator software. Mission Critical Applications Business Critical Applications Dev/Test Environments USER SELF-SERVICE PORTAL Provisioning Policies Protection Policies API Infrastructure API STORAGE ORCHESTRATOR Infrastructure Orchestrator Infrastructure Pool Hypervisor Hypervisor Hypervisor System Figure 2: Reference Architecture for delivering SAN St-aaS 8

9 Reference Architecture for NAS St-aaS NAS-based environments are file-based and are typically used as a centralized repository for file sharing. File sharing is simple to implement at the storage layer due to standard Windows-based Common Internet File System (CIFS) protocol. However, there has been a growing requirement for providing mobility to end-users and ability to auto-sync the files across multiple personal devices such as the ipad, iphone, Blackberry and Android devices. While public cloud storage solutions address this requirement effectively, such solutions are restrictive in an enterprise environment where data security is of prime importance. The reference architecture for NAS based St-aaS aims to address this challenge and provide an effective 'onpremise' storage solution for enterprises. A key component in a NAS based St-aaS solution is a unified storage that can scale vertically and horizontally. system should be used with the storage virtualization feature to provide the multi-tenant environment for different business units. Small File Shares (< 1 GB) Medium File Shares (1GB 5 GB) Large File Shares (5 GB 10 GB) Windows Phone Android Web Browsers (IE, Chrome, Mozilla, Safari) Mac OS Blackberry Bu01 Bu02 Bu03 User Self Service Portal File Syncing Servers Orchestrator CIFS Share CIFS Share CIFS Share System Figure 3: Reference Architecture for delivering SAN St-aaS 9

10 Conclusion Organizations are making considerable effort to achieve economies of scale by leveraging cloud-based business models. Escalating storage costs demands a private cloud storage that can provide scalability and self-service automation at the storage layer through a standardized storage catalog to address day-to-day storage requirements. Organizations are also looking at implementing a metering and chargeback mechanism to effectively calculate and recover the cost of storage based on IO consumption and capacity utilization. The St-aaS model that can address the block and file-based storage requirements of the enterprise, can also address business requirements effectively. To implement a St-aaS model, organizations must deploy private cloud storage through a standardized service framework to address the breadth of provisioning and protection requirements for different end-users. The private cloud storage needs to be scalable, both vertically and horizontally and provide an end-to-end secure multi-tenant environment to host different BUs on the shared storage infrastructure. The storage service catalog can be used to automatically provision and allocate the required storage capacity to the application or end-user. The SAN based reference architecture can address the requirements of applications ranging from mission critical, business critical and dev/test environments. The NAS based reference architecture provides the solution for file storage and sharing requirements for end-users and at the same time ensures that the solution addresses the mobility requirements of the end-user. The SAN and NAS reference architectures, though provided separately for more clarity, can be implemented as a single unified architecture for delivering private cloud based -as-service (St-aaS). References [1] SNIA, ization: The SNIA Technical Tutorial, accessed Nov 08, 2013, 10

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