level of prescription from the business that existed previously. Essentially departments can manage their own business without the external influence of what is and should have always been, the consumer. This can be likened to a consumer turning on a light in the home, whilst dictating the electrical switching gear that must be used in the local sub-station. Consumers simply don’t need to care anymore on which brand cables the power is being delivered over. Secondly, the IT department now has the flexibility to manage the whole infrastructure as a single, highly available entity without worrying about multiple and diverse, silos of infrastructure.
All of this has become possible due to the maturity of key technologies, such as virtualisation at every level, compute, storage and networking and in particular the standards glue such as CDMI. Advances in efficiencies at the storage layer such as thin provisioning, deduplication, thin replication and highly efficient protection have meant the cost of storing petabytes of data has fallen and the cost to protect that data is following suit.
Cloud earned its name from the icon that represented complicated networking infrastructure, often the Internet where the viewer of the diagram had no requirement to understand what happened in that space. It was a mask to complexity. However, we don’t store data on the network, holding it in flight on the cable infrastructure is obviously not how it works. To hold it all in computer memory is also a concept that we are nowhere near, as server technology hasn’t quite reached
the point of a collective consciousness with each node being aware of all data. Therefore, storage is the enabler for all of this technology and the component on to which the most attention should be laboured. It needs to be highly available, protected and highly performing, but more importantly in these economic times it needs to be efficient.
Storing multiple copies of data without actually using the same multiples of storage capacity is critical to reducing costs and increasing utilisation. Looking back to the source of this new excitement, the consumer market such as flickr, facebook and the like, none of these services would be of any use without the storage behind them.
Recent numbers show that by summer 2011, Facebook alone will contain 100 billion photos! We are adding 6 billion a month to that total. The same concept is moving front and centre in the business world too, where users are expecting the same levels of availability and seemingly endless capacity that these external services provide, within their work environments.
This is the challenge that storage teams face today. The cloud demands infinite capacity from finite resources. We’ve often joked that this was the demand of the business. Now they have evidence that it can be done. Can your storage deliver the impossible or at the very least, the illusion of the impossible?
For more information on CDMI please visit
http://snia.org/cdmi WWW.SNS-UK.CO.UK MARCH | 2011
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