cloud-connected storage

Is cloud-connected storage your path to the future?

The hybrid cloud infrastructure model has become the platform of choice for most businesses for two reasons.

First, questions about security and sovereignty means that some operations are best retained in-house to maintain compliance.

Second, time sensitive operations, particularly operations that rely on real-time processing, need to be kept on-premise. Latency between local data centre and the cloud could prevent timely processing.

Time to blur the boundaries

Despite best efforts, current hybrid models emphasise the disconnect between on-premise and cloud. The number of applications and operations being run locally may have decreased, but the CTO must still deploy sufficient processing and storage capacity for those that remain.

This is where the choice of on-premises technology platform becomes crucial. Ideally you want to eliminate the barrier between local and hosted resources to create a seamless, unified platform on which to build.

One choice would be NetApp AFF storage. The ultra-low latency all flash arrays are powered by ONTAP, NetApp’s comprehensive management and configuration system providing cloud-connected storage.

Included in ONTAP is the FabricPool technology which allows you to connect various public and private cloud services directly to your on-site infrastructure. This forms the basis of your seamless hybrid cloud.

Time to get smart

A unified platform is just the start of a future-ready infrastructure, however. FabricPool goes further, using intelligent rules and analysis to automate data and workload allocation.

Mission-critical applications requiring the very highest levels of performance are retained in-house, using the NVMe flash to minimise latency. FabricPool then re-allocates other workloads to off-site cloud platforms to help balance performance and cost.

Embracing the multi-cloud future

Despite the best efforts of cloud providers, CTOs have been keen to avoid the trap of vendor lock-in. The ability to move workloads between providers cost effectively is important for future proofing and flexibility, driving a more towards multi-cloud deployments.

Best-of-breed infrastructure can be costly to set-up and maintain, mainly because the relevant skills are in such high demand. As a result, many of the cost-control opportunities of multi-cloud operations are lost through increased staffing and administration costs.

Again, NetApp AFF technology can help you build a multi-tier storage strategy. FabricPool analysis will identify and categorise workloads, moving data to the most appropriate cloud platform automatically. Shifting ‘cold data’ to a hosted archive service will help to reduce per-terabyte storage costs and free up valuable high-performance local capacity. Extra sensitive data can be piped to lower-cost private cloud storage if preferred too.

Cloud-connection will be key to the future

The beauty of cloud platforms is the flexibility they offer. With almost infinite scalability, your business is free to rapidly grow its systems without capital investment.

But while some workloads remain tied to the local data centre, there is no reason similar scalability cannot be deployed on premise. Choosing all-flash arrays with the ability to join on-off-site platforms offers exceptional processing speed and the option to extend into the cloud whenever required.

While the hybrid cloud model remains default, CTOs should pay close attention to their choice of on-premise systems. Cloud-connected storage offers valuable strategic opportunities – and a way to bridge the on/off-premise divide seamlessly.

Useful Links

White Paper: Optimise Oracle Workloads with NetApp Solutions

Benefits of backing up to the cloud versus tape

The benefits of backing up to cloud versus backing up to tape

Tape has been the backup media of choice for over 60 years, due to its portability and reliability. Tape technology has developed and density has increased, meaning cost per gigabyte has been low, but the complexity and time consuming nature of tape management means many organisations are looking for an alternative.

A traditional tiered storage architecture uses local disk or networked storage for speedy access to primary data, then periodically sends snapshots or data to a backup server that writes the data to magnetic tape. Usually stored onsite in tape backup libraries and sometimes replicated to an offsite location, via WAN or even manually moved to an offsite storage facility.

Cloud backup offers organisations a new way of backing up their data, removing the complexity and risk of manually moving and handling magnetic tapes and improving the performance, availability and reliability of backups.

Whilst the cost of tape storage has come down, the costs associated with handling, managing and storing tape media have been increasing. At the same time, the cost of public cloud services has been coming down, allowing customers to take advantage of economies of scale, making them an accessible and affordable backup solution. Cloud has no upfront capital investment costs, no costs associated with media, or configuration and no data retrieval costs.

Using the public cloud to store backup data is generally a very reliable solution, with some CSPs offering a durability service level agreement of 99.999999999%. The chance of data loss through infrastructure failure therefore is incredibly low. The availability that public cloud providers can achieve is generally higher than most organisations can implement in house, with multi-site replication and failover of every single component.

Magnetic tape on the other hand is based on mechanical equipment which can fail and lead to data loss or unavailability. The quality of data stored on tape can be eroded if retrieved and read too often, although more robust tape intended for frequent use is available, the cost is often prohibitive.

Tape can perform well for read write capabilities but can be unpredictable. The retrieval of data is particularly slow, especially for large datasets, from hours to days. When retrieving data from the cloud, organisations are often hindered more by WAN speeds than native storage performance, but there are still options available offering lower cost, longer term storage, which inevitably takes longer to restore.

Whatever requirements an organisation has, there are many reasons why a public cloud backup solution is the right option. Cost, performance, availability, reliability and the ability to restore quickly and easily, are all big reasons to consider cloud over tape.