Cloud storage is strategically inevitable

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1 Cloud storage is strategically inevitable IBM can help in preparing for a successful cloud storage deployment Highlights Use cloud technology to enable speed and innovation by empowering users and communities to define, create and collaborate on new offerings and services, as well as improve business agility Successfully deploy cloud storage using essential IBM technologies Cultivate and exploit open standards to achieve an enduring approach to cloud Economic pressures continue to drive much of the IT agenda while, at the same time, executives are demanding that IT incorporate new and innovative technologies to drive growth and innovation. Social, mobile and big data analytics capabilities are reshaping interactions between customers, employees, vendors and business partners, enabling new revenue opportunities for enterprises while at the same time creating unprecedented data growth challenges. In order to take advantage of these capabilities, the enterprise needs a robust and flexible storage infrastructure. And many organizations are looking at the cloud as a way to deliver storage services more quickly and efficiently. Cloud adoption is skyrocketing. Some IT managers are choosing to build private clouds themselves. Some are choosing to have service providers host clouds for them. Some are choosing to rent cloud services from public cloud providers. And, increasingly, there are hybrid implementations. One thing is certain it is hard to find an IT manager today who is not dealing with the cloud. It is clear that the cloud has the potential to provide technical and business advantages that can transform business. But without the proper foundation in place, the promise of cloud storage will likely go unrealized, putting organizations in the unenviable position of having invested in cloud solutions without being prepared to fully benefit from them.

2 The time has come to meet user needs with the cloud Developers Deliver my new application, quickly. Provide me the testing platform now. CFO, CEO Safeguard my data. Reduce cost, use what you have, comply with regulations. IT professionals Employees I need to share and collaborate. I d like to use my own device, from wherever I am. Line of business IT is not fast enough to support my strategy and is slowing down innovation. I need to react quickly to market demand. Cloud enables speed, agility and innovation The cloud can help IT organizations and businesses create and deliver value in new ways: For IT organizations, the cloud facilitates better cooperation by enabling new processes that break down traditional silos and simplify access to information. With cloud, IT can: Deliver faster and higher-quality services globally Integrate services across environments Utilize IT resources more effectively Increase operational efficiency For business users, the cloud supports innovation by empowering internal and external communities to define, create and collaborate on new offerings and services, and to improve business agility. With cloud, businesses can: Establish new revenue streams Drive faster time to market for new services Meet customer expectations (wherever they are) by providing fast access to information (wherever it may be located) Become more competitive in the marketplace The true promise of cloud isn t just about speeding service, resource provisioning and return on investment (ROI). It s also about reinventing business. In fact, 90 percent of forwardthinking IT leaders are approaching cloud more strategically to enable the speed and agility that business innovation requires. 1 2

3 Storage cloud Storage as a Service Use cases: File store and share Archive Backup Hybrid clouds Compute cloud IT as a Service Use cases: Development / test Website hosting Seasonal compute needs Private clouds Public clouds What cloud means to storage In this new era of IT, workloads will operate on virtual, cloudbased compute infrastructure for functions such as development and testing, website hosting and seasonal compute needs. The data that those workloads operate on will live in virtual, cloudbased storage capacity. Enterprises will need to store large amounts of content, whether for sharing with colleagues, for archiving to use later or for backup in case of data loss. Whichever form of cloud proves best for their environment from building internal private cloud services to running services on managed or hosted clouds to a hybrid approach that combines both enterprises can access the benefits of the cloud. To make benefits possible in the storage arena, a certain set of enabling capabilities must come together. Users will want selfservice access to storage capacity on demand and they ll want to be able to get that access from anywhere. At the same time, the IT managers who are housing the data will want to be hyper efficient not only in how they store data, but in how they manage the infrastructure. And they will want to charge back, or at least show back, costs so consumers will be aware of the effect their requests and decisions have on the cost to the business. When organizations realize improvement in these three areas, the results can be dramatic, as this value-delivery chart comparing traditional and cloud storage demonstrates: Value delivered to Traditional Cloud end user Storage provisioning Weeks/hours Minutes Continuous access to data Centralized Storage capacity Fixed Dynamic Localized (anytime, anywhere) 3

4 What users want, what cloud infrastructure should deliver User Self-service Infrastructure Efficiency / utilization Access from anywhere Optimized management On-demand capacity Metering / chargeback Protection Security / compliance Common goal: Open-cloud architecture The IBM perspective on building cloud capabilities is that the only enduring approach will be through the cultivation and exploitation of open standards. Without an open-standards approach, clients can be pigeon-holed into islands of proprietary point solutions that don t interoperate over the long term. That s why IBM is investing significant effort in forming, sponsoring and supporting open-source solutions: As a founding member of the 400-member Cloud Standards Customer Council As an OpenStack Platinum Sponsor and one of the top contributors to the open-source OpenStack code base By dedicating more than 500 developers to open-cloud projects By working closely with the OpenStack Foundation, with its 8,600+ members from 87 countries and 179 companies IBM is a leading storage contributor to the OpenStack Foundation with IBM developers working on projects including Nova (compute cloud), Cinder (block storage cloud) and Swift (object storage cloud) to create petabyte-scale cloud repositories of secure, compliant, hyper-efficient storage. IBM products are tightly integrated to OpenStack solutions. IBM XIV Storage System, the IBM Storwize family, IBM DS8700 and IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center support OpenStack Compute (Nova) and OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder). IBM offers 4 industry-leading storage features accessible through OpenStack. All of the advanced features of Storwize family systems, such as IBM Easy Tier and IBM Real-time Compression, are readily accessible via standard OpenStack mechanisms, as is the ease of use of XIV. In the upcoming release of OpenStack (Havana), only the Storwize driver provides storage-based volume migration. Storwize system-driven volume migration enables users to leverage storage system performance rather than relying on server cycles and network bandwidth to do the work. The path to success IBM understands that success with cloud storage begins by first establishing a scalable and efficient storage infrastructure. Efficiency starts with virtualizing the storage environment. Virtualization enables organizations to aggregate storage so that capacity can be efficiently allocated across applications and users to improve utilization. Data compression and deduplication are tools used to reduce the size of data files so that less storage space is required. Traditional storage infrastructures, with their inconsistent service levels, manual provisioning, tedious performance tuning and disruptive data migration processes, often fail to deliver the quality of service and availability required by clouds. To achieve higher utilization through cloud storage, organizations must be able to standardize and automate all their processes for typical storage-related tasks. Automation is the only

5 accurate, fast and cost-effective way to ensure that processes are consistently completed across the organization. Additionally, cloud-ready storage systems must provide automated data tiering for speed and cost savings. The architecture should allow transparent centralization of data and migration from older systems. Self-service provisioning with automated metering, reporting and billing capabilities that benefit all users are a must in any cloud deployment. An end user should be able to carry out simple requests, such as for storage capacity, quickly and without involving IT staff. And cloud storage systems should be able to quickly adapt and leverage industry-standard tools and protocols for portability, expandability and quick deployment. IBM offers essential storage technologies to enable successful cloud storage deployments, including: Storage virtualization, which enables automated provisioning and online quality-of-service tuning without disrupting users or applications Thin provisioning, which eliminates the need to preallocate storage, so that costs can match the pay-per-use payment model Scale-out performance and capacity, which allows performance to scale linearly with added capacity for predictable performance for any workload, at any time Self-tuning, self-healing grid architecture, which ensures optimal performance under unpredictable conditions IBM Hyper-Scale Manager, which enables storage to grow into petabytes without adding complexity Easy Tier automated tiering, which maintains performance levels without manual storage tuning Real-time Compression, which increases usable storage capacity up to five times without impacting application performance 2 IBM Active Cloud Engine, which gives IT administrators the ability to manage files efficiently, whether they are in a single data center or dispersed throughout multiple data centers across geographic locations Tiered Storage Optimizer, which uses analytics-driven data management, automation and the IBM storage virtualization platform to periodically balance storage workloads for efficiency and performance User self-service provisioning, which enables access to capacity on demand for file sharing, collaboration and development testing Representational state transfer (REST) application programming interface (API) for cloud storage integration, which enables better support with other management applications from independent software vendors Cloud-ready storage systems from IBM IBM provides industry-leading storage systems that are inherently virtualized. XIV Storage System is an ideal storage solution for large-scale cloud deployments, delivering predictable and consistent performance for unpredictable workloads due to its self-tuning, self-optimizing grid architecture. Its design is unique in that it requires virtually no effort to manage, provision and optimize storage. Along with many other IBM storage products, XIV Storage System is designed to seamlessly integrate into popular cloud environments, such as OpenStack or VMware vcloud. Just like XIV, the Storwize family of virtualized storage systems easily complements virtualized server environments. Each Storwize solution is designed with simplicity and costeffectiveness in mind, delivering intuitive management, scalable capacity and high availability. These systems offer industryleading efficiency and flexibility through built-in flash storage optimization, Real-time Compression and thin provisioning. IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) is an ideal solution for file stores and content repositories with its ultrahigh petabyte-level scalability. At the core of SONAS is Active Cloud Engine, which enables collaboration among users around the globe, distributes files to multiple locations quickly and localizes data to reduce network costs. IBM SmartCloud Storage Access complements XIV, Storwize family and SONAS storage systems to provide self-service storage capacity provisioning, monitoring and reporting. This intuitive, easy-to-use software gives users and on-demand applications greater agility and rapid access to storage capacity. Automated metering and billing associated with pay per use are also possible using an accounting or billing application, such as IBM SmartCloud Cost Management. Storage software such as IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center automates everyday tasks such as data protection and data lifecycle mobility. The more automated the storage environment, the more predictable the processes and operating costs associated with them. In addition, the IBM SmartCloud solution comes with Tiered Storage Optimizer, an industryleading technology that allows users to classify multiple heterogeneous storage systems into different tiers based on system capabilities, and automatically, nondisruptively migrate volumes between those tiers to meet user-defined service levels. 5

6 Why IBM? Building on a foundation of open standards and interoperable technologies, IBM provides cloud solutions for every stage of cloud deployment, enabling speed and agility within client infrastructures. Innovative technology, open standards, excellent performance, and a broad portfolio of proven storage software, hardware and solutions offerings are just a few of the reasons to consider storage solutions from IBM. In addition, IBM provides a single source for comprehensive, well-integrated yet flexible cloud solutions so organizations do not have to worry about the complexities of dealing with different hardware and software vendors. Global IBM scalability and reach allows organizations to costeffectively leverage IBM expertise worldwide. Eighty percent of Fortune 500 companies use IBM cloud capabilities. And IBM continues to integrate cloud technologies into its own business, improving how products work in concert, from both technology and business perspectives. IBM has an extraordinary track record when it comes to making technology work and working with organizations to achieve an outstanding return on investment. For more information To learn more about IBM solutions for a successful cloud storage deployment, contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit: ibm.com/systems/storage/solutions/cloud/index.html Copyright IBM Corporation 2013 IBM Corporation Systems and Technology Group Route 100 Somers, NY Produced in the United States of America October 2013 IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com,, IBM SmartCloud, Storwize, XIV, and EasyTier are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at Copyright and trademark information at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates. THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED AS IS WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided. Actual available storage capacity may be reported for both uncompressed and compressed data and will vary and may be less than stated. 1 Saul J. Berman, Anthony Marshall and Rohini Srivathsa, The power of cloud: Driving business model innovation, IBM Institute for Business Value, February XB&infotype=PM&appname=GBSE_GB_TI_USEN&htmlfid=GBE03470USEN& attachment=gbe03470usen.pdf 2 IBM lab measurements April Please Recycle TSS03079-USEN-01