The next
BriefingsDirect inside
story interview explores how a software-defined data center (SDDC)-focused
systems integrator developed an ultimate open-source object storage
environment.
We’re now going to learn how Key Information Systems crafted a storage capability that may have broad extensibility into such realms as hybrid cloud and multi-cloud support.
We’re now going to learn how Key Information Systems crafted a storage capability that may have broad extensibility into such realms as hybrid cloud and multi-cloud support.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
Here to help us better understand a
new approach to open-source object storage is Clayton Weise, Director of
Cloud Services at Key Information Systems in Agoura Hills, California. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
We've had
this massive explosion of unstructured data, files, and all sorts of things. We
have a number of clients in medical and finance, and they have just seen this huge
spike in data.
So we took a similar approach in object storage as a private-cloud service. We went down the open source path in terms of how we handled the provisioning. We needed something that integrated well with that. We needed a system that had the multitenancy, that understood the tenancy, and that is provided by OpenStack. We found a solution from HPE called Distributed Cloud Networking (DCN) that allows us to carve up the network in all sorts of interesting ways, and that way we don't have to dictate to the client how to run it.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: What prompted you to improve on
the way that object storage is being offered as a service? How might this become
a new business opportunity for you?
Weise: About a year ago, at Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)
Discover, I was wandering the event floor. We had just gotten out of a meeting
with SwitchNAP, which is a major data
center in Las Vegas. We had been talking to them about some preferred concepts
and deployments for storage for their clients.
That discussion
evolved into realizing that there are number of clients inside of Switch and their
ecosystem that could make use of storage that was more locally based, that needed
to be closer at hand. There were cost savings that could be gained if you have
a connection within the same data center, or within the same fiber network.
Pulling data in and out of a cloud
Under this model, there would be significantly less expensive ways of pulling data in and out of a cloud, since you wouldn’t have transfer fees as you normally would. There would also be an advantage to privacy, and to cutting latency, and other beneficial things because of a private network all run by Switch and through their fiber network. So we looked at this and thought this might be interesting.
In discussions with the number of groups within HPE while wandering the floor at Discover, we
found that there were some pretty interesting ways that we could play games
with the network to allow clients to not have to uproot the way they do things,
or force them to do things, for lack of a better term, “Our way.”
If you go
to Amazon Web Services or you go to Microsoft Azure, you do it the Microsoft
way, or you do it the Amazon way. You don’t really have a choice, since you have
to follow their guidelines.
They
generally use object storage as an inexpensive way to store archival or
less-frequently accessed data. Cloud storage became an alternative to
tape and long-term storage.
Where we
saw value is, there are times in the mid-market space for clients -- ranging from a couple
of hundred million dollars up to maybe a couple of billion dollars in annual revenue
-- where they generally use object storage as kind of an inexpensive way to
store archival, or less-frequently accessed, data. So [the cloud storage] became
an alternative to tape and long-term storage.
The challenge is: To deploy your own object storage is a fairly complex operation,
and it requires a minimum number of petabytes to get started. In that mid-market,
they are not typically measuring their storage in that petabytes level.
These
customers are more typically in the tens to hundreds of terabytes range, and so
they need an inexpensive way to offload that data and put it somewhere where it
makes sense. In the medical industry particularly, there's a lot of concern
about putting any kind of patient data up in a public cloud environment -- even
with encryption.
We thought that
if we are in the same data center, and it is a completely private operation
that exists within these facilities, that will fulfill the total need -- and we
can encrypt the data.
But we
needed a way to support such private-cloud object storage that would be multitenant.
Also, we just have had better luck working with open standards. The challenge
with dealing with proprietary systems is you end up locked into a standard, and
if you pick wrong, you find yourself having to reinvent everything later on.
I come from
a networking background; I was an Internet plumber for many years. We saw the
transition then on our side when routing protocols first got introduced. There
were proprietary routing protocols, and there were open standards, and that’s
what we still use today.
Transition to
HPE Data Center Networking
So we took a similar approach in object storage as a private-cloud service. We went down the open source path in terms of how we handled the provisioning. We needed something that integrated well with that. We needed a system that had the multitenancy, that understood the tenancy, and that is provided by OpenStack. We found a solution from HPE called Distributed Cloud Networking (DCN) that allows us to carve up the network in all sorts of interesting ways, and that way we don't have to dictate to the client how to run it.
Many clients are still running traditional networks. The
adoption of Virtual Extensible
LAN (VXLAN) and other types of SDDC within the network is still pretty low,
especially in the mid-market space. So to go to a client and dictate that they
have to change how they run the network it is not going to work.
And we
wanted it to be as simple as possible. We wanted to treat this as much as we
could as a flat network. By using a combination of DCN,
Altoline
switches from HPE, and some of other software, we were able to give clients a complete
network carrying regular Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) across it. We then
could tie this together in a hybrid fashion, whereby the customers can actually
treat our cloud environment as a natural extension of their existing networks,
of their existing data centers.
Gardner: You are calling this hybrid storage
as a service. It’s focused on object storage at this point, and you can take
this into different data center environments. What are some of the sweet spots
in the market?
The
object service becomes a very inexpensive way to store large amounts of
data, and unlike tape -- with object as a service, everything is
accessible easily.
Weise: The areas where we are seeing the most
interest have been backup and archive. It’s an alternative to tape. The object service
becomes a very inexpensive way to store large amounts of data, and unlike tape --
where it's inconvenient to access the data -- with object as a service everything
is accessible very, very easily.
For
customers that cannot directly integrate into that object service as supported
by their backup software, we can make use of object gateways to provide a
method that's more like traditional access. It looks like a file, or file
share, and you edit the file share to be written to the object storage, and so
it acts as a go-between. For backup and archive, it makes a really, really
great solution.
The other
two areas where we seen the most interest have been in the medical space, specifically
for large medical image files and archival. We’re working now specifically to
build that type of solution, with HIPAA compliance. We have gone through the
audits and compliance verification.
The second use-case
has been in the media and entertainment industry. In fact, they are the very
first to consume this new system and put in hundreds of terabytes worth of
storage -- they are an entertainment industry client in Burbank, California. A
lot of these guys are just shuffling along on external drives.
For them it’s
often external arrays, and it's a lot more Mac OS users. They needed something
that was better, and so hybrid object storage as a service has created a great
opportunity for them and allows them to collaborate.
They have a
location in Burbank, and then they brought up another office in the UK. There
is yet another office for them coming up in Europe. The object storage approach
allows a kind of central repository, an inexpensive place to place the data --
but it also allows them to be more collaborative as well.
Gardner: We have had a weak link in cloud computing
storage, which has been the network -- and you solved some of those issues. You
found a prime use-case with backup and archival, but it seems to me that given
the storage capabilities that we've seen that this has extensibility. So where
it might go next in terms of a storage-as-a service that hybrid cloud
providers would use? Where can this go?
Carving up the network
Weise: It’s an interesting question because
one of the challenges we have all faced in the world of cloud is we have virtualized
servers and virtualized storage, meaning there is disaggregation; there is a
separation between the workload that’s running and the actual hardware it’s
running on.
In many
cases, and for almost all clients in the mid-market, that level of
virtualization has not occurred at the network level. We are still nailed to
things. We are all tied down to the cable, to the switch port, and to the human
that can figure those things out. It’s not as flexible or as extensible as some
of the other solutions that are out there.
In our case,
when we build this out, the real magic is with the network. That improved connection
might be a cost savings for a client -- especially from a bandwidth standpoint.
But as you get a private cross-connect into that environment to make use of, in
this case, storage as a service, we can now carve that up in a number of different ways and
allow the client to use it for other things.
For example, if they want to have burst capability within
the environments, they can have it -- and it’s on the same network as their
existing system. So that’s where it gets really interesting: Instead of having
to have complex virtual guest package configurations, and tiny
networks, and dealing with some the routing of other pieces, you can literally
treat our cloud environment as if it's a network cable thrown over the wall -- and
it becomes just an extension of the existing network.
We
can secure that traffic and ensure that there is high-performance,
low-latency and complete separation of tenancy. If you have Coke and
Pepsi as clients, they will never see each other.
That opens
up some additional possibilities. Some things to work on eventually would be block
storage, file storage, right there existing on the same network. We can secure
that traffic and ensure that there is high-performance, low-latency and
complete separation of tenancy. So if you have Coke and Pepsi as clients, they
will never see each other.
Gardner: Very cool. You can take this
object storage benefit -- and by the way, the cost of that can be significantly
lower because you don’t have egress charges and some of the other unfriendly
aspects of economics of public cloud providers. But you also have an avenue
into a true hybrid cloud environment, where you can move data but also burst
workloads and manage that accordingly. Now, what about making this work toward
a multi-cloud capability?
Transition to
HPE Data Center Networking
Weise: Right. So this is where HPE’s DCN
software-defined networking (SDN) really starts to shine and separates itself
from the pack. We can tie environments together regardless of where they are. If
there is a virtual endpoint or physical appliance; if it's at a remote location
that can be deployed, which can act as a gateway -- that links everything
together.
We can take
a client network that's going from their environment into our environment, we
can deploy a small virtual machine inside of a public cloud, and it will tie
the networks together and allow them to treat it all as the same. The same
policy enforcement engine and things that they use to segregate traffic in
microsegmentation and service chaining can be done just as easily in the public
cloud environment.
One of the
reasons we went to Switch was because they have multiple locations. So in the
case of our object storage, we deployed the objects across all three of their
data center sites. So a single repository that’s written the data is
distributed among three different regions. This protects against a possible
regional outage that could mean data is inaccessible, and this is the kind of recent
thing that we in the US have seen, where clients were down anywhere from 6 to
16 hours.
One big network, wherever you are
This
eliminates that. But the nice thing is because of the network technology that theywere using from HPE, it allowed us to treat that all as one big network -- and
we can carve that up and virtualize it. So clients inside of the data center --
maybe they need resources for disaster recovery or for additional backups or
those things -- it's all part of that. We can tie-in from a network standpoint and
regardless of where you want to exist -- if you are in Vegas, you may want to
recover in Reno, or you may want to recover in Grand Rapids. We can make that network
look exactly the same in your location.
You want to
recover in AWS? You want to recover in Azure? We can tie it in that way, too. So
it opens up these great possibilities that allows this true hybrid cloud -- and
not as a completely separate entity.
Gardner: Very cool. Now there’s nothing
wrong, of course, with Switch, but there are other fiber and data center folks
out there. Some names that begin with “E” come to mind that you might want to
drop in this and that should even increase the opportunity for distribution.
Weise: That’s right. So this initial
deployment is focused on Switch, but we do a grand scheme to work this into
other data centers. There are a handful of major data center operators out
there, including the one that starts with an “E” along with another that starts
with a “D.” We do have plans to expand this, or use this as a success use-case.
As this
continues to grow, and we get some additional momentum and some good feedback,
and really refine the offering to make sure we know exactly what everything
needs to be, then we can work with those other data center providers.
Whenever
clients deploy their workloads in those public clouds, that means there
is equipment that has not been collocated inside one of your
facilities.
From the data center operators’ perspective, if you're one
of those facilities, you are at war with AWS or with Azure. Because whenever clients
deploy their workloads in those public clouds, that means there is equipment
that has not been collocated inside one of your facilities.
So they
have a vested interest in doing this, and there is a benefit to the clients
inside of those facilities too because they get to live inside of the ecosystem
that exists within those data centers, and the private networks that they carry
in there deliver the same benefits to all in that ecosystem.
We do plan
to use this hybrid cloud object storage as a service capability as a model to
deploy in several other data center environments. There is not only a private
cloud, but also a multitenant private cloud that could be operative for clients
that have a large enough need. You can talk about this in a multi-petabyte
scale, or you talk about thousands of virtual machines. Then it's a question of
should you do a private cloud deployment just for you? The same technology, fulfilling
the same requirements, and the same solutions could still be used.
Partners in time
Gardner: It sounds like it makes sense, on
the back of a napkin basis, for you and HPE to get together and brand something
along these lines and go to market together with it.
Weise: It certainly does. We've had some
great discussions with them. Actually there is a group that was popular in
Europe that is now starting to take its growth here in US called Cloud28+.
We had some
great discussions with them. We are going to be joining that, and it’s a great
thing as well.
The goal is
building out this sort of partner network, and working with HPE to do that has been
extremely supportive. In addition to these crazy ideas, I also have a really
crazy timeline for deployment. When we initially met with HPE and talked about
what we wanted to do, they estimated that I should reserve about 6 to 8 weeks
for planning and then another 1.5 months for deployment.
Transition to
HPE Data Center Networking
I said, “Great
we have 3 weeks to do the whole thing,” and everyone thought we were crazy. But
we actually had it completed in a little over 2.5 weeks. So we have a huge
amount of thanks to HPE, and to their technical services group who were able to
assist us in getting this going extremely quickly.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
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