Storage aS a Service— Scaling for the cloud era

Why build a cloud Storage Service?The Cloud phenomenon is just getting started. 2011 statistics indicate that 20% of business organizations are ‘in the cloud’, (cloud.com). But even those 20% who ‘have begun executing their Internet strategies’ will generally admit that they have merely been testing the waters for later, larger deployments.

According to any relevant metrics this industry is just getting going:

• 61% plan to use cloud services in the next 2 years, (from a 2011 survey by cloud.com)

• 30% storage growth per annum (Gartner) • $22Bn worldwide market size by 2015 (IDC 2011)

The cloud storage industry is set to balloon at a tremendous rate over the next few years. The potential for business is intriguing. These early stage market indicators merely presage a revolutionary explosion to come. Cloud storage services are assured a monumental role in this evolving landscape. This year the important questions are how to structure an offering and which technology partners will enable and future-proof these solutions?

Corporations have found many use cases for cloud storage, from simple backups of files and emails, to the complete outsourcing of application infrastructure and application-related unstructured data. Consumers are more and more attracted to cloud-based storage services, as they alleviate the pain of sorting through and deleting ever-growing catalogs of music, pictures and videos.

Although several service providers already boast $100 million in cloud storage revenues, the market still offers many opportunities for new leaders to appear. Service providers with an established customer base and a strong differentiation in services are well poised to take advantage of these opportunities.

However, time is of the essence.

Building a cloud storage service requires excellent levels of automation and flexibility and the capability to deliver a service with high availability and data security guarantees, at a very low production cost. This is the solution that Scality has built for service providers.

HoSt euroPe StAAS cASe Study:“Strategically, we wanted a product that would be scalable, offer redundancy and flexible billing.Scality’s RING delivers all that, making it the product that we wanted to have.” —Patrick Pulvermüller, Managing Director

http://www.scality.com/host-europe-case-study/

The cloud storage industry is set to balloon at a tremendous rate over the next few years.

What is Scality?Scality is the inventor, and patent-holder, of a carrier-grade object storage platform designed from the get-go for massive scalability, high performance, flexibility and simplicity of operations.

tHe need for A neW StorAge model

Most of today’s storage systems were built for databases and enterprise file-based applications, and are not suited to handle the proliferating terabytes of user-generated content that the IT world is witnessing today.

The cost of storage is falling at 30 percent a year and it is now possible to find a few reliable SAN or NAS appliances for as little as $1,000 per terabyte of raw capacity. While these solutions are adequate for serving files to thousands of users, their centralized nature does not efficiently scale to solve the problem of storing billions of files for millions of users.

When trying to do so, whether for backup, archival or emerging cloud storage solutions, numerous manual tasks are needed such as managing multiple volumes, configuring specialized network gear, dealing with unavoidable disk failures and very long RAID rebuild times, as well as managing complicated disaster recovery scenarios. The operational cost of managing traditional storage becomes far greater than the initial purchase cost, which makes the total cost of ownership prohibitive for large scale deployment.

This is the storage conundrum, currently familiar to service provider CTOs and their engineers, which Scality has solved with an innovative and cost-efficient storage infrastructure.

tHe uSuAl dAtA StorAge cHAllengeS fAced by tHe StAAS mArket

Nonstop exponential data storage growth is most evident to storage as a service (STaaS) providers. When a service provider sees a small increase in the number of clients, data storage requirements may expand by multiple orders of magnitude. Unstructured data such as user photos, blogs, and videos rapidly consume storage space. Statistics also show that service users accelerate their storage usage over time.

Traditional storage makes life complicated for the STaaS storage administrator attempting to meet the proliferation of user data. Such legacy solutions tend to be overly complex, making them exceedingly difficult to expand or scale capacity without loss of performance, and are particularly onerous when scaling object stores to the levels commonly required for STaaS.

To make STaaS into a viable business, data storage must overcome the following challenges:

Inability of most traditional data storage systems to scale STaaS to Pb levels

Traditional solutions lead to storage system sprawl, with excessive expenditures of time and money on management, infrastructure, and ongoing data migrations—all in an ultimately futile effort to chase down the root causes of data storage and retrieval problems.

Incompatibility with distributed and shared geographic access A wide variety of different workgroups, contractors, or customers

located in dispersed geographic locations need concurrent local access to verify, edit, change, add, convert, rework, or manipulate content.

inability to accommodate data that lives longer than the hardware lifespans

Periodic tech refreshes of traditional storage systems are complex and problematic, requiring scheduled downtime far in excess of consumer expectations. furthermore, upgrading to a newer generation system requires staging the new system in parallel with the old one, migrating the data, and decommissioning the old system. Operations which are highly error prone.

Excessive HA and DR costs and complexity High availability and disaster recovery demand multiple

copies of hardware, software, data, and data centers, adding significant cost and complexity.

Impractical TCO Total cost of ownership of traditional storage is based on a

model that does not work for organizations with large, rich media requirements.

It is possible to make traditional SAN or NAS storage work for Cloud Storage, but it is like fitting a square peg in a round hole, it is very innefficient and impractical. The combination of challenges listed above make it both complex to manage and expensive. The requirement of true 24 x 7 operations with traditional storage technology implies the use of very costly configurations and software. In this context it is impossible to deliver a profitable service at current market prices.

Storage that makes StaaS a Viable business

eSSentiAl StAAS requirementS

STaaS customers start with GBs of data that rapidly expand to TBs. It doesn’t take that many customers to quickly consume PBs of capacity and billions of objects. EBs are not just theoretical to the STaaS provider; exabyte capacity storage is real and imminent.

Concurrently, geographically dispersed users challenge the STaaS provider to distribute copies of the data across vast distances. This requires a storage system container that can distribute data to the location that best meets service level agreements (SLAs), and that provides the best combination of performance, service, and availability to the STaaS customer. A geographically dispersed customer base creates the requirement for always up and available storage, 7 x 24 x 365.

STaaS storage must provide for transparent tech refreshes, and enable all scheduled and unscheduled maintenance tasks without any user disruption. It must fulfill all of the following requirements:

Ability to scale to billions of objects while maintaining performance for all users without disruption

STaaS storage must be able to accommodate PBs to EBs of capacity, and billions of objects or files, with satisfactory performance for millions of concurrent users.

Ability to share files across geographically distributed locations Files and data must be movable, based on policy, to where they

are required when they are required.

Always available and online Five nines (99.999%) availability all the time.

Infrastructure capable of accommodating data longevity without downtime

Because data lives longer than hardware, tech refreshes must be mostly automated and transparent to the service users.

flexibility to change, or even mix and match, hardware vendors

Adjusting infrastructure to accommodate changing markets and technologies can mean the difference between business success and failure.

Competitive TCO Increased competition from Amazon, Google, and other

mega service providers requires the lowest possible total cost of ownership to maintain profitability.

Decreasing margins and competition has put increasing pressure on STaaS providers to meet or exceed their storage requirements at the lowest possible TCO. Especially given the broad revenue variability of the StaaS provider business, a storage system with pay-by-the-drink (pay-per-use) pricing would seem to be a much better fit than the upfront pricing of traditional storage (pricing for fixed, preset storage capacity).

tHe ScAlity offer

The storage costs for a Scality RING private cloud SLA are based on GB/month and take into account CapEx and OpEx overheads. The rates decrease for higher amounts of usable capacity. This graph shows the rates estimated for a storage solution with full redundancy (FR) providing data durability % of twelve nines (99.9999999999%).

HoW ScAlity ring WorkS

Scality RING Organic Storage is architected from the ground up to meet and exceed all STaaS provider requirements. It scales capacity into the exabytes, files or objects into the billions, and does so over a geographically dispersed area. The scalability of the RING solution is the direct result of its unique Distributed Hash Table (DHT). DHT is an extraordinarily efficient lookup methodology that enables storage and retrieval of very large numbers of files or objects at a very high level of performance.

ScAlity ring: A noVel APProAcH

Scality’s approach is completely different from NAS, SAN or even Content Addressable Storage (CAS) systems. Instead of focusing on blocks of data, file systems or even content, Scality concentrates on what your application needs to achieve to satisfy individual users and rights holders. Specifically, it handles and stores objects—documents, multimedia content, emails and blobs—according to the needs of the application and the user context. Because it’s metadata aware, Scality RING is capable of providing intelligent service to the application, such as making popular objects available faster than less popular ones.

Scality RING delivers on the cloud’s promise of unlimited storage capacity and lower infrastructure costs while improving application performance and the security of on-premise installations. It enables service providers with large data storage needs to create their own storage cloud for a range of services—including pure StaaS, hosted SharePoint, backup and DR services, or collaboration solutions—at a fraction of the cost of traditional NAS and SAN storage, without the fear of degraded performance over time or excessive administrative overhead.

Scality software is totally hardware-agnostic and runs on any generic server, avoiding hardware vendor lock-ins while allowing exploitation of the latest technology in storage media, such as SSDs or SAS disks for performance or SATA disks to control costs.

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The Solution: ScAlity ring™ orgAnic StorAge

Scality RING Organic Storage provides unparalleled data, nodal, and system availability by leveraging its distinctive, industry-hardened and carrier-grade peer-to-peer technology. The RING also comes with unequalled built-in system data resilience similar to an organic immune system. Every node constantly monitors a limited number of its peers, automatically rebalancing replicas and load to make the system fully self-healing without human intervention. Consistent hashing guarantees that only a small subset of keys is ever affected by a node failure or removal. The RING also rebalances the data load automatically when a node fails, is removed or upgraded, or when new nodes are added. RING makes technology refresh a simple, online process with no application disruptions, eliminating data migration, long nights, and sleepless weekends. The result is a very high level of fault tolerance because the system stays reliable even with nodes joining or leaving the ring. Scality RING keeps costs low by enabling the use of standard off-the-shelf commodity server nodes, and through the use of a paradigm shifting pay-by-the-drink pricing model. Unlike traditional storage, Scality RING charges are based on used capacity, not raw storage capacity, thereby assuring the lowest possible storage TCO.

tHe rS2 connector

The REST Storage Service connector provides a mechanism to deliver storage, control access and manage billing. The RS2 connector allows the creation of an on demand service that can be used on a pay as you grow basis. It is comprised of the following elements:

Public facing interface: This component provides a public Internet facing HTTP interface in both plain text and SSL. This is the interface used by service subscribers to upload, download and delete objects, as well as create and delete buckets that contain objects, and to control access to its objects using bucket based Access Control Lists (ACLs). The same basic REST mechanisms and approaches are available as those supported by Amazon Web Service’s Simple Storage Service (S3).

Authentication interface: This component is a standard authentication interface that validates the secret key associated with end users requests. The validation is performed using an XML-RPC request directed at the company’s end user management platform.

Scality RING 2One of many

STaaS

Scality RING 1Primary

STaaS

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RS2Replication

InternetRS2 ConnectorVirtual App Server

Scality RING Storage NodeDesktop UserMobile Users

Figure 1: Scality Organic RING Storage Solution Diagram

About ScAlity

Scality is the developer of RING, a software platform enabling cloud storage to easily scale up to exabytes using commodity server hardware with direct attached storage. Scality delivers the performance and reliability of a SAN- or NAS-based architecture without the aggravations of volume management—at one third to half of the cost.

Business uses for Scality RING include Rich Media, Governments, Web 2.0, Storage-as-a-Service, Email storage (for millions of users), and other cloud computing business applications. Deployments manage billion of files while meeting or exceeding the high performance expectations of application users. Scality RING is based on a patented object storage technology, that delivers high availability, ease of operations and total data control.

PArtner for SucceSS

Partnering with Scality means gaining access to Scality’s extensive storage and market expertise, innovative technologies, pay-as-you-go pricing, intuitive integrated billing, training, business planning, best practices, branding, business tools, and even lead generation. Best of all, service providers are able to continue using the applications and tools at their disposal, enabling and facilitating uninterrupted market growth. This permits investment to match revenue models, providing an immediate ROI, without the limitations of traditional storage solutions.

leArn more

Additional references are available at www.scality.com. You can also follow Scality on Twitter: @Scality.

© 2012 Scality. All rights reserved. Specifications are subject to change without notice. Scality, the Scality logo, Organic Storage, RING, RING Organic Storage, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Scality in the United States and/or other countries.

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