I D C T E C H N O L O G Y S P O T L I G H T M a naging the Explosion of Enterprise Data: T i m e t o S c ale Out, Not Scale Up July 2014 Adapted from Scale-Out Meets Virtualization by Ashish Nadkarni, IDC #238534 Sponsored by CSC and EMC Because of the nature of today's global, mobile, social, and virtualized IT, enterprises are continually faced with the task of cost effectively managing and storing vast amounts of structured and unstructured data. But this data cannot just be stored and forgotten as it represents a treasure trove of information that can be analyzed for competitive advantage and it needs to be actively managed to maintain regulatory compliance. As organizations move to the cloud where high-speed access and agile infrastructure are critical, enterprises are beginning to see the limits of scale-up physical architecture. As a result, businesses are now looking at scale-out storage technology, a scale-as-you-go solution that can be a bridge to cloud computing. This Technology Spotlight describes how the changing nature of IT is putting pressure on traditional storage solutions and discusses scale-out storage technology as well as its benefits and delivery. After a discussion of CSC's Storage as a Service Performance Stack, enabled by EMC technology, this document offers some guidance to enterprises looking to adopt scale-out storage solutions. Introduction For a long time, the primary driver for capacity growth and demand for investments in enterprise infrastructure has come from a structured data ecosystem. This ecosystem has centered on database applications that create and manage structured data sets, servers that run the database applications, and, of course, the storage systems on which the data resides. Unstructured data was negligible, mostly coming from internal users. But the new model for enterprise IT, which includes Big Data, mobile computing, social media, and virtualization, has changed the mix between structured data and unstructured data. IDC estimates that in 2017, unstructured data will account for 79% of storage capacity shipped and 57% of revenue. Much of the growth of unstructured data in the enterprise will come from end-user computing an ecosystem that is slowly shifting toward BYOD devices such as smartphones and tablets and connected "things" such as security cameras and sensors. This puts pressure on enterprise IT to find a way to cost effectively store these vast amounts of structured and unstructured data. At first, businesses increased capacity by purchasing more inhouse capacity; then shared storage network architectures such as enterprise storage area networks (SANs) became an alternative to parallel SCSI connectors and direct-attached storage (DAS). They were the perfect replacement for IT infrastructures that were fragmented, inefficient, and error prone as a result of "DAS silos." Primarily as a result of virtualization, capacity-optimized shared disk became the mainstay of most IT environments. But a fundamental shift is happening in the storage and use of data. No longer is this information "cold" and simply housed somewhere. Enterprises are analyzing both structured and unstructured data to gain a competitive advantage, so they are looking for better ways to store this information and keep it "hot" able to be retrieved and used in real time. Further adding to this need is a spate of IDC 1736
newer applications, such as server and desktop virtualization of mission-critical applications, Big Data, social, and mobility. Newer cloud-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings are being adopted across a broad range of industries to supplant their on-premises infrastructure. In addition, newer hardware platforms contain faster CPUs, memory, and disks and can be connected via ultrahigh-speed networks. Faster Internet capabilities enable businesses to distribute their workforce geographically. These developments are pushing the envelope of shared storage networks with regard to certain types of use cases such as cloud storage, content repositories, geodispersed data access, and analytics. As virtualization, cloud computing, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and IaaS continue to gain acceptance, enterprises are hitting the limits of scale-up storage architecture. As a result, enterprises are forced to deploy more storage to spread the workload over more storage controllers. This results in reduced utilization efficiency and therefore a higher cost per virtual server image. In other words, the need for "scale as you grow" storage architecture is rising. Scale-Up Versus Scale-Out Storage Scale-out storage is a type of network-attached storage (NAS) that can be expanded as necessary. Because it's network or cloud based, scale-out capacity can be increased by adding new drives, even if they reside in different storage arrays. Before scale-out storage was available, enterprises often purchased very large storage arrays to ensure that plenty of disk space would be available for future expansion. If that expansion never occurred or capacity needs turned out to be less than expected, much of the originally purchased disk space went to waste. Scale-up storage is also confined to a single form factor. In scale-out storage, new hardware is added and configured when needed. Scale-out solutions use a distributed file system or object-based storage model to span multiple server hosts or controllers while presenting a single namespace. As a result, the initial investment in storage can be lower and there is no limit to the number of arrays that can be added, meaning an enterprise has access to limitless storage resources. Conversely, scale-up storage infrastructure creates a tollgate effect. This bottleneck is exacerbated when I/O-intensive applications are virtualized. As businesses seek to virtualize their mission-critical environments, they have to increase their storage footprint, which in turn reduces utilization efficiency. In addition, as more businesses move I/O-intensive transactional and analytics environments to virtualized infrastructure, they are forced to move the compute layer closer to the data layer. This creates a need for scale-out "compustorage" environments that are very well suited for virtualized and cloud infrastructure in which performance and capacity can be scaled independent of each other. Because scale-out storage provides a seamless way to increase capacity, either on-premises or in the cloud, it offers significant benefits: Scale-out storage is an easy way to extend existing NAS or SAN capacity, particularly using the cloud. For enterprises that need to retain data for long periods of time because of regulatory, legal, or general business/data analytics reasons, this inactive data may be housed in a scale-out cloud environment. Cloud-based scale-out storage can also be ideal for offsite data backups. When cloud-based scale-out storage is used in conjunction with data protection applications, enterprises can minimize or even completely eliminate tape infrastructure as well as tape handling and tape collection services while improving backup times. 2 2014 IDC
IDC sees five key business value results from using scale-out storage solutions: Capital costs will be lowered as enterprises reduce initial outlays for depreciating storage assets. Storage can become an operational expense if an organization chooses to use the service delivery model for scale-out storage. Storage costs have historically decreased over time, so an organization has the ability to adjust storage-as-a-service rates annually, thus passing industry cost reductions onto the enterprise. Scale-out storage enables rapid deployment. Initial setup can happen in weeks, not months, and ongoing incremental capacity increases can occur overnight. From a flexibility standpoint, organizations can quickly scale up or down storage resources to increase business agility. Delivering Scale-Out Storage Scale-out storage can be viewed as a bridge from a datacenter to the cloud while functioning in the same way as on-premises disk storage systems. While scale-out storage can reside on customers' premises, solutions increasingly are located in the cloud, either as part of an enterprise network or as a service offered by a third party. Unlike traditional physical disk systems, scale-out storage can use the cloud as the persistent storage layer. As a result, enterprises can integrate cloud storage into applications and workflows without moving the applications or on-premises systems into the cloud. Scale-out storage can be delivered multiple ways. Because scale-out architectures are software based, many suppliers are packaging their solutions on storage appliances, especially those that serve enterprise IT organizations. On the other hand, cloud solution providers use their own hardware and deliver scale-out solutions as a service. From a data organization perspective, many suppliers have focused their efforts on creating distributed file systems layered on top of local file systems with native file access. Others are adding file access interfaces to object-based solutions, which eliminates the sluggish performance of past object platforms. Finally, some suppliers of scale-out storage are offering solutions that move the computing and data storage fabrics closer to each other to provide a holistic service. Considering CSC's Storage as a Service Performance Stack, Enabled by EMC Technology CSC has been providing IT services and solutions for more than 50 years. This global company's portfolio features a broad range of cloud, mobility, datacenter, and connectivity solutions designed to increase IT infrastructure capacity, ROI, and performance. Included in CSC's offerings are complete datacenter environments that achieve ISO standards, high availability, and optimized IT infrastructure; compute services in which the company helps customers design, deploy, and maintain powerful compute infrastructure; enterprise connectivity services to help customers design and deploy WAN, LAN, and Internet connectivity; and a portfolio of fully managed data storage services that provide scalable solutions to meet the needs of information-intensive global enterprises. 2014 IDC 3
In particular, CSC's Storage as a Service Performance Stack is a fully managed NAS service that provides multiple performance options so that enterprise clients can store data in a manner appropriate to their applications. Performance Stack is private cloud storage that resides either in the client's datacenter or in CSC's datacenter. The scale-out storage solution combines EMC's Isilon NAS architecture with CSC expertise in implementation, management, and service. CSC Storage as a Service Performance Stack is available in three tiers of performance: an ultrafast stack for demanding applications, a midtier stack, and a capacity stack for applications that produce or use large amounts of data. As needs change, data can move seamlessly between stacks. In addition, the solution does not require data migration; the service merely adds a new tier to the network to increase performance. With Performance Stack, data can be stored where it is most needed by the enterprise, near the application or users, enabling rapid access without extra retrieval costs. The solution includes snapshot capabilities that provide an independent, usable copy of data, eliminating the need to reformat data when needed and providing data from a single, easily accessible source. The fully managed offering provides a secure service that is completely controlled by the enterprise. Authentication, for example, uses existing access accounts, eliminating the need to create new accounts for specific users. CSC Storage as a Service Performance Stack is massively scalable to over 15PB in a single file system and offers more than 100Gbps throughput. CSC offers a utility pricing model, so enterprises pay for only what is used. Indeed, CSC claims that an organization's gigabyte-per-month pricing can be significantly reduced compared with traditional storage. The CSC service also includes redundancy for efficient backup and recovery. Because Performance Stack is a single file system, with a single volume and global namespace, data is easily managed to meet SLAs. The solution also supports a wide range of industry-standard protocols, including NFS, SMB, HTTP, FTP, iscsi, and HDFS. Challenges But CSC does face challenges. Because business today is so data intensive, storage solutions represent opportunity for device vendors and service providers alike, meaning that the company faces stiff competition. CSC must continue to stress the value of its long-term expertise with the quality of EMC's Isilon architecture. In addition, most enterprises have based their data storage growth on the scale-up model. Scale-out requires a different way of thinking and trust in resources or services not completely under enterprise control. It's imperative that CSC demonstrate not only the value and flexibility of scale-out storage solutions in general but also the security and reliability of its scale-out services. Conclusion and Essential Guidance All companies, regardless of size, are faced with the issue of data growth. More storage will be required as enterprises embrace Big Data, mobility, social computing, and virtualization. While the rate of growth may differ from company to company, there is no doubt that organizations will have to consider new approaches for dealing with their data, particularly as they reach the limits of data interfaces of traditional scale-up storage architectures. And as companies continue their adoption of cloud computing, scale-out storage is increasingly a viable option. 4 2014 IDC
Scale-out solutions make excellent platforms for test and development environments, as well as many tier 2 and 3 workloads. Enterprises also should consider software-based scale-out solutions that use commodity hardware for initiatives such as a desktop virtualization deployment. In addition, organizations should consider scale-out storage for solutions such as cloud gateways that allow virtual images to be distributed globally. IDC believes that enterprises should consider the following fundamental elements when evaluating scale-out storage: Scalability. Scalability must be considered not just from a hardware perspective but also from throughput, file size, and file volume perspectives. Appropriate solutions will allow each dimension to scale independently. Data management. Another big consideration is management. Data layout and organization may have performance, efficiency, and availability implications. Over time, as data grows, organizations will face the need to mine existing data for patterns that may build new business cases around new findings. A solution that supports advanced metadata, indexing, and analytics will be key. Data optimization. The larger the data set and bigger the storage system, the greater the need for data management and reduction techniques (data deduplication, compression, thin provisioning, etc.), so efficiency is critical. Data optimization technologies (automated data tiering) become essential. A solution appropriate for a given environment will allow many features to be implemented and recalibrated without major disruptions. Enterprises need to work with vendors and service providers that offer a diverse set of scale-out options that can create private cloud environments, content repositories, and data-as-a-service delivery. Organizations should evaluate data models, infrastructure, workload, and quality-of-service characteristics of a supplier's scale-out solutions. Most important, enterprises should examine the strategic role scale-out storage solutions will play in their IT infrastructure, particularly with respect to functionality and investment protection. It's only natural that network-attached storage evolves with the rest of enterprise IT. With the widespread changes in how businesses collect, analyze, store, and manage data, scale-out storage is a viable alternative to traditional scale-up approaches. To the extent that CSC can meet the challenges described in this document, CSC Storage as a Service Performance Stack, enabled by EMC technology, has a significant opportunity for success among enterprises looking for a scale-out storage solution. A B O U T T H I S P U B L I C A T I ON This publication was produced by IDC Custom Solutions. The opinion, analysis, and research results presented herein are drawn from more detailed research and analysis independently conducted and published by IDC, unless specific vendor sponsorship is noted. IDC Custom Solutions makes IDC content available in a wide range of formats for distribution by various companies. A license to distribute IDC content does not imply endorsement of or opinion about the licensee. C O P Y R I G H T A N D R E S T R I C T I O N S Any IDC information or reference to IDC that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from IDC. For permission requests, contact the IDC Custom Solutions information line at 508-988-7610 or gms@idc.com. Translation and/or localization of this document require an additional license from IDC. For more information on IDC, visit www.idc.com. For more information on IDC Custom Solutions, visit http://www.idc.com/prodserv/custom_solutions/index.jsp. Global Headquarters: 5 Speen Street Framingham, MA 01701 USA P.508.872.8200 F.508.935.4015 www.idc.com 2014 IDC 5