Accelerating Cloud Adoption via Standards & Collaboration

Date: May 25, 2010, 4:00pm EST / 1:00pm PST

Duration: 60 minutes

Register:http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/20535

Abstract:
Gartner identified Cloud Computing as the top technology for 2010, yet the number of enterprises choosing to adopt the cloud is not as high as anticipated. Implementation of cloud infrastructure is a strategic IT decision that involves careful evaluation and promises long term benefits, while application deployment has been more readily adopted in the short term. The experts at this summit will highlight best practices for managing cloud infrastructure, discuss how to distribute workloads in the cloud and give you an overview of what services are available in the market today.

This event will be moderated by Mark Carlson of the SNIA Technical Council, DMTF Board of Directors, Sun Microsystems and Cloud-Standards.org

About the Panelists Val Bernovici is Chairman of the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative and works in the Office of the CTO at NetApp Winston Bumpus is president of DMTF and Director of Standards at VMware Craig Lee is President of Open Grid Forum and Senior Scientist in the Computer Systems Research Department of The Aerospace Corporation Jon Siegel is Vice President of Technology Transfer at Object Management Group and formerly worked in the Computer Science Research Department at Shell Development Company

 

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View the full Cloud Computing Summit lineup featuring Frost & Sullivan, Burton Group, Akamai, Zynga, VMware, and more.

As the “cloud” becomes a common platform, web applications still live in a “stovepipe” world. It’s not a question of “should we move to the cloud?” It’s a question of once some, or most, or all of our web applications live in the cloud, how do we handle the problems of scalability, security, identity, storage, integration and interoperability?

What was the problem of “enterprise application integration” in the late 90s, is now the cambrian explosion of web–based applications that will demand similar levels of integration. The problem, put simply, is how to “glue” all of these apps, data, people, work–flows, and networks together.

Glue is the only conference devoted solely to this new problem–set facing architects, developers and integrators. At Glue, we’ll explore the new technologies that are forming around web applications in a post–cloud world.

SNIA’s own Mark Carlson will be presenting on CDMI at Gluecon, and you can check out the rest of the Gluecon agenda here: http://www.gluecon.com/2010/Glue2010_Agenda.htm

If you’re interested in attending Gluecon, use the code, “snia1” to receive 10% off of the registration. If you’re interested in sponsoring Gluecon, please contact Eric Norlin at enorlin@mac.com.

  by: Gary Gumanow EXTENDING NETWORK STANDARDS 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE), standardized by the IEEE in 2004, delivers ten times the bandwidth of previously available networking technologies, and its availability has prompted the development of new standards for the data center, delivering on the promise of a single networking fabric or technology to connect storage, the LAN, and Inter-Processing Communication, or IPC. These new IEEE standards go by several names: "Converged Enhanced Ethernet," "Data Center Ethernet," and the industry-standard term "Data Center Bridging," or DCB. In this series of blogpostings we provide an overview of the reasons DCB is being developed and how it can improve networking in the data center for applications, servers, and storage. ETHERNET RELIES ON TCP FOR "LOSSLESS" COMMUNICATIONS Many IT managers deploy their networks to be "lossless" by over-provisioning bandwidth so all network applications can operate at their desired bandwidths. However, networks are dynamic organisms, change over time, and most likely have changed once rolled out. IT managers don't plan for their networks to drop packets from inception and therefore having inherent mechanisms to recover from them are a necessity. While Ethernet is generally a reliable technology, data packets can be dropped in transmission due to network congestion, traffic load balancing, over-subscription, and loads on servers and switches. Dropped packets don't cause big problems, but they can result in performance variations for applications. Protocols, such as TCP (TCP/IP), run on top of Ethernet to ensure seamless communications. TCP will take note if packets are dropped during communication, and if so, those packets are re-sent, but if not, confirmation of a completed transmission is returned. With this "handshake," TCP delivers "lossless" communications. TCP also provides a dynamic flow control mechanism, called windowing, which essentially elasticizes the two ends of a buffered connection based on the capabilities of those endpoints. Finally, TCP provides routing capabilities so that communications work seamlessly across routed and different networks. In a converged Ethernet environment, storage network technologies that do not have a built-in recovery mechanism like TCP, require safeguards against dropped packets. Enter Data Center Bridging, the most recent set of IEEE standards that provide this enhancement to Ethernet. The next blogpost in this series will focus on some of the benefits of DCB and what makes it so compelling for storage in today's data centers. If DCB provides the benefit to your SAN as promised, what percentage improvement in performance would you need to see in order to implement a change to the infrastructure for DCB? Are you seeing issues today with performance and TCP retransmits?

IT as a Service (ITaaS), or cloud services (clouds), was one of the "buzz" topics at SNW this Spring. And industry groups, such as SNIA's Cloud Storage Initiative, are beginning to address the standards, policies, and marketing messages that help define what is ITaaS or clouds. Whatever the definition, "cloud" technologies appear ahead of attempts to describe them. In fact, many customers are deploying cloud solutions today. A few obvious examples include online email and CRM solutions that have been available for several years. Enabling these cloud offerings are technologies that are very complimentary, namely virtualization in its various forms, and Ethernet or IP networks. For this article, I'll put in a specific plug for iSCSI. iSCSI plays well in the Cloud I have described what I think are the top five requirements for cloud deployments and how well iSCSI addresses them in an article published in SNS Europe magazine February 2010. You can read the article online here. I'll describe these five requirements briefly: Cost, Performance, Security, Scalability, and Data Mobility. Cost: As a cloud service provider, the cost of goods for your services is essentially your IT infrastructure. Keeping these costs low represents a competitive advantage. One of the ways to reduce cost is to move to higher volume, and therefore lower cost components. Ethernet offers the economies of scale to deliver the lowest cost networking infrastructure both in terms of capital and operating expense associated with its extensive deployment across all industries as well as simplified management. Performance: Your cloud environment needs to scale in performance to meet the demands of a growing customer base. Ethernet offers a variety of means and price points to address performance. Gigabit Ethernet with addition of port bonding or teaming offers simple and cost effective scalability, sufficient for most business applications. 10 Gigabit Ethernet is now being deployed more readily since price points have dropped below the $500 per port range. We'll soon see 10 Gigabit ports standard on server motherboards, which will offer significant increases in network bandwidth with fewer ports and cables to contend with. Security: Because Ethernet was developed as a general purpose network, efforts were made to support data security in mixed traffic environments. The TCP/IP stack includes security protocols, such as CHAP and IPSec, to address these requirements. These security protocols extend to storage traffic as well. Scalability: Scalability can be described in many ways. I have already referred to performance scalability. But, scalability also refers to geography. IP networks span the globe and offer the capabilities needed to address IT services of customers in diverse geographies, which is at the heart of Cloud services. Inherent abilities to route data traffic offer some additional advantages for storage. Data Mobility: One of the features of IP networks that I believe is particularly well suited for clouds is virtual IP addressing. IP addresses can move from physical port to physical port, allowing you to migrate the network connectivity easily as you migrate other virtual objects, such as virtual servers. As a result, IP based storage protocols, such as iSCSI, are particularly well suited in highly virtualized cloud environments. IP Networks for the Data Center As the evolution of the data center continues to deliver dynamic and highly virtualized services, we will see that Ethernet storage networks, including iSCSI, will deliver the value required to make cloud service providers successful. IP networks offer the economics, performance, security, scalability, and mobility required for the current generation and next generation data center. And for more on this topic, check out this webinar http://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/23778.

The MySQL Conference, a gathering of programmers who share database strategies, was held in the Santa Clara Convention Center this week.  One hot topic was SSDs. My favorite session was hosted by Fusion-io.  They rounded up four satisfied customers who discussed how Fusion-io SSDs had benefited them. Craigslist, found that in their systems the RAID card was their highest point of failure.  That doesn't help much, when the whole point of a RAID system is to prevent failures!  Although the company is only halfway through their first SSD deployment, they are recognizing 2/3 power reductions while their tests are running surprisingly faster than they had with RAID systems.  SSDs are allowing them to move to two incidences of MySQL on a single server with two IOdrives on each server.  Their bottleneck has moved from storage to the software. Cloudmark, a net security firm that blocks Spam for over 1 billion in-boxes, started with a system that consumed 48U of servers and storage, and their needs ballooned to the point that they were worried they couldn't keep pace.  By adding SSDs they were able to actually reduce their systems to 17U, losing 180 drives along the way.  Their processor CPUs are now operating at maximum capacity, something they have never seen before.  Cloudmark's present system runs 22Us of systems with 22 IOdrives operating in a RAID configuration that is significantly cheaper than a SAN.  The SAN costs $500K.  They have been able to replace this with two servers, each with an IOdrive, for about $20K all told. Answers.com: The 18th-rated Internet site in the US and 31st worldwide, is a staunch user of HP hardware.  When HP announced their support of the IOdrive, Answers.com bought a couple and found that they could avoid the purchase of four additional servers by buying a 320GB Fusion-io drive for the price of about two servers.  When they compared performance against their SAS-based systems Answers.com was astounded to get a ten times improvement in complex queries from 350 to 3,500 per second.  Restoring the system from backup dropped from over 6 hours to 12½ minutes!  CPU loading dropped from 30% to 18%.  The company's old topology had five data centers with four servers per data center.  Today a single server per data center does the trick.  Their tests indicate that they could reduce the number of servers to 1/9th the original number, but conservative policies prevent them from trying this.  The current configuration has been in place for one year, and the company still has more processing power than they need. Percona is an important MySQL consulting firm, helping clients through system analysis, coding, and even training.  Percona ran extensive tests on Fusion-io and Intel mainstream SSDs in comparison with enterprise HDDs and even HDD RAID systems.  The conclusion was that the Fusion-io IOdrives were a hands-down winner in database applications. All in all these four users present an extremely compelling case for SSDs in general, and Fusion-io drives in particular (although we should keep in mind that Fusion-io selected the speakers for this panel.)  With the results these firms experienced it's clear that now is the time for all data center managers to stand up and pay attention!

Last week’s SNW show in Orlando had encouraging signs that the recession is receding. IT end-user attendance was slightly up on previous shows (although vendor attendance was down); IT end users had budget and were looking for the optimal way to invest it, and there was clear excitement around a number of topics – including solid state storage. Solid State Storage was well represented on the agenda, both in the vendor-neutral SNIA Tutorials, and in the SNW sessions: SNIA Tutorials: • Executive Overview and Current Topics in Solid State Storage, Rob Peglar, Xiotech • Apples to Apples, Pears to Pears in SSS Performance Benchmarking, Esther Spanjer, Smart Modular Technologies • Latency: the Heartbeat of a Solid State Disk, Levi Norman, Texas Memory Systems • The Benefits of Solid State in Enterprise Storage Systems, David Dale, NetApp • Using SSD MLC NAND in Data Center Applications, Tony Roug, Intel • Solid State Storage Architectures, Jamon Bowen, Texas Memory Systems SNW Vendor Presentations: • Panel: Is SSD Right for your Enterprise? Moderator: Jeff Janukowicz, IDC; Panelists: David Dale, NetApp; Steve Johnson, LSI Corporation; Gary Tressler, IBM; Rich Vignes, Seagate; Tom Lattin, HP • Dynamic Tiering – Taking Advantage of the Best of HDDs and Solid State, Ron P. Bianchini, Avere Systems • Getting the Most out of SSDs- Data Center IT System Optimization Best Practices, Mike Chenery, Pliant Technology • Flash Solid State Storage reliability & data Integrity – Are We There Yet? David Flynn, Fusion-io All of the presentations are available on the SNW website. In addition, the SNIA Tutorials are available on the SNIA website. Check them out.

The podcast about FCoE and iSCSI that I mentioned in my last blog is now posted on Storage Monkeys.

Check it out. Clearly, we were having way too much fun!

Tags: iSCSI, FCoE, Ethernet, convergence

Well we're already into Day 1 of Spring SNW, and the SNIA tutorials educational program is well under way.

I presented to a packed room at 9:20am on the subject of Server and Storage Consolidation with iSCSI Arrays - a great audience for the first session of the day.

Tuesday afternoon's agenda includes pNFS, Parallel Storage for Grid, Virtualization and Database Computing by Pranoop Erasani (NetApp), and Thursday's agenda includes two tutorials by Gary Gumanow (Dell) & Jason Blosil (NetApp) -- iSCSI SANs: Ideal Applications, Large and Small, and iSCSI: A Lossless Ethernet Fabric with DCB. If you're at SNW check them out.

If you are not at SNW, you can access the tutorials at http://www.snia.org/education/tutorials/.

Another opportunity to find out about Ethernet Storage is in the IP Storage Hands-on Lab. This program is in its 7^th year and continues to go from strength to strength.

Finally, I'm scheduled to do a podcast with Skip Jones (of the Fibre Channel Industry Association) on FCoE, iSCSI and Network Convergence. That should be posted on the Infosmack Podcasts section of Storage Monkeys by Wendesday.

Wow - the Ethernet Storage Forum and the FCIA co-operating! What is the world coming to?

Tags: iSCSI, DCB, pNFS, Ethernet Storage

An article in today's ComputerWorld says that Apple's new iPad is driving cloud storage. How appropriate then that the Cloud Storage Initiative is giving one away Tuesday night at the Birds of Feather Session.

To get in the drawing, visit the Tuesday SNW Cloud Pavilion or the CSI "taste" booth at the Monday opening reception., then come by the BOF Tuesday April 15, 8:30pm, St. John’s Rooms 32-33 - MUST BE PRESENT TO WIN!

One of the most interesting use-cases for the pending SNIA CDMI Cloud Storage standard involves Cloud service brokerage.  Cloud Storage services in particular. The Peering capabilities enabled via CDMI will further facilitate the emergence of a new business category in Cloud Computing - The Cloud Broker. Recently advocated by leading analyst firms, this role would mitigate key risks around the federation of various Cloud services.  Even the US Federal CIO has recently spoken out regarding this key characteristic of upcoming Government Cloud services and related NIST Cloud Computing standards. Data integration, integrity, portability and security are among the many issues Cloud Brokers are tackling on behalf of Enterprise Cloud customers. See this diagram for some of the useful Cloud Storage relationships enabled by CDMI for configurations which would address these issues.

Members of the SNIA CDMI technical working group and Cloud Storage Initiative will be at SNW Orlando this week. (1. presenting vendor-neutral tutorials, 2. staffing the Cloud Storage pavilion in the Exhibit Area, 3. assisting the service providers in the Cloud Hands-on-Labs and 4. leading a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session on Cloud Storage)  See 2 posts below for full details. Please drop by and share your thoughts with us on the role of Cloud Brokers - and any other Cloud Storage topic of interest to you!