A NEW BREED

storageage
and workloads across the enterprise.
‘It also gives enterprises the ability
to efficiently scale performance and
capacity non-disruptively from small to
extremely large environments, and to
dramatically simplify management of
the storage infrastructure.’
When it comes to costs, the difference
between deploying scale-out storage
on-premise or the same capabilities in
the cloud depends on the amount of
performance, data, access patterns and
locations that users require.
As with any buying decision, there
is an inflection point. For many
enterprises, it can range from several
months – if their usage is large – to
three years if their usage is moderate.
However, an organisation’s existing
infrastructure, business and application
processes, and practical security
concerns make it near-impossible to
put everything in the cloud.
‘A brand new business will have an
easier time if they architect for cloud,
including compute, right out of the
gate,’ says Jeff Sisili, senior director
product marketing at DDN, ‘But
remember – the cloud companies are
in business to make money too.’
Therefore, comparing the total cost of
ownership (TCO) of scale-out storage
deployed in-house versus that in the
cloud is challenging since each uses a
different cost model.
In-house TCO is typically composed of
capital expenses for the equipment and
software, and operating expenses such
as admin, property, power and cooling.
‘Cloud TCO is typically 100%
operational costs for the scale-out
storage service and requires no
additional real estate, power or cooling
‘The flexible architecture
at the heart of scale-out
storage becomes even
more vital when you
consider that storage
set-ups now also have to
support back-end work’
>> Tarkan Maner, Nexenta
charges,’ says Jeff Tabor, senior director
of product management and marketing
at Avere Systems. ‘Next-generation
scale-out storage systems, both
in-house and in-cloud, are being
successfully deployed today, meeting
budgets and providing substantial
savings over previous generations.’
Band aid
It should be noted that scale-out
storage is not a solution for everybody.
And, like all technology solutions,
alternatives do exist.
The aforementioned solution of
all-flash arrays is one option – and a
worthy alternative to legacy storage
architectures in which performance
and capacity are conjoined. However,
scaling capacity within an all-flash
infrastructure can be expensive,
depending on the effectiveness of data
footprint reduction methods, such as
compression and deduplication.
Another option is data-as-a-service
(DaaS), where one copy of production
data can be virtualised multiple times
without adding significant storage or
CPU resources.
According to Jes Breslaw, director of
strategy at Delphix, scale-out storage is
a ‘band aid’ hiding the real problem:
traditional storage approaches are not
effective. ‘If you take any large-scale
enterprise company, there will be a
number of shared environments that
copy production data in its entirety,’
Breslaw says. ‘Scale-out storage is yet
another way for infrastructure to avoid
running out of steam, but it’s costing
more money and adding no extra value
back to the application teams that need
the underlying data.’
DaaS saves on 80% to 90% of storage
costs, Breslaw claims, and makes the
data more agile with application teams
who are then able to self-service full
copies on-demand, rewind data to any
point in time, recover data instantly and
make hundreds of copies of the data
readily available.
‘Most hosting companies charge by the
megabyte for transferring and storing
data, but with DaaS organisations can
replicate on-premise storage with the
cloud and then virtualise the copies
they need. This means that only the
changes are being transferred into the
cloud, and the virtualised copies take up
no extra space.’
30 information-age.com September 15