Planning for Success: Private Storage Clouds

Scalability – Cloud storage allows for space to be dynamically allocated and used as per requirement.

Disaster recovery – Cloud storage allows for improved disaster recovery because of its distributed nature.

Load balancing – Cloud storage allows for fewer connection bottlenecks with dynamic rerouting of traffic.

Mobility – Cloud storage allows access to any authorized user over the company LAN or Internet.

Cost savings – Cloud storage requires fewer dedicated IT staff for maintenance.

The need for automation – Enterprise IT cannot cope with the current and future profusion of storage without automation as provided by private storage clouds.

Unreliability of storage scripts – Enterprise IT has traditionally depended on storage scripts written by storage administrators to automate certain administrative tasks. However, these suffer from two fatal flaws:

Tight ties to originator – These scripts, being tightly tied to the storage administrator who developed them and often not documented properly, become unusable once those originators depart.

Lack of standardization – These scripts are often developed ad-hoc and do not meet strict quality standards.

End users may bypass enterprise IT – There is a real fear that, faced with the shortcomings of traditional storage in terms of responsiveness and services offered, end users may bypass the IT department altogether and turn to public cloud providers. Not only will this diminish IT’s importance in the enterprise, such behavior will undermine data security. With private storage clouds, IT can meet end-user expectations and ensure data security.

The need for controlling IT administration costs – With the exponential growth in storage, storage administrators are very much in demand. Unfortunately, growth in their ranks is miniscule (1.5 times current levels by 2020). In such a scenario, suitable staff are hard to come by and expensive. Even with existing staff, there is high turnover. Private storage clouds reduce the number of dedicated staff required for maintenance. Additionally, proper documentation of best practices insulates the enterprise from high turnover and reduces training costs for new employees.

The need for regulatory compliance – In the wake of legislation like Dodd-Frank, regulatory oversight of data and how it is used by enterprises has increased considerably. Private storage clouds ensure that best practices are followed and that each operation performed is audited and recorded for regulatory compliance.

The need for compatibility with other cloud offerings – Cloud computing is growing by the day, and private storage cloud is the only storage paradigm that is elastic enough to ensure compatibility with other cloud offerings like infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), virtual desktop interface (VDI), etc.

Self-service portal – It should provide a portal for storage consumers such as DBAs, application developers, and server support staff to submit and track requests for automated storage services as well as advanced storage services such as replication and migration. The portal should support appropriate authentication protocols for making such requests.

Storage services catalog – It should provide users with a catalog of fully automated storage services that may be fired up in a few steps. Access permissions should be granted as per defined roles.

Full automation – It should allow for full automation of services without the need for manual intervention by the storage administrator. These services should include: Provisioning – Allocating storage space dynamically as per requirement; Reclamation – Making optimum use of available storage space, including reclaiming unused memory fragments; and Remediation – Disaster recovery in case of outage without affecting normal performance.

Storage classification – It should provide storage administrators the capability to classify storage and storage services, thereby allowing differential service depending on classification.

Universal compatibility – It should be compatible with hardware from multiple vendors like HP, Dell, Hitachi, etc.

Interoperability with other clouds – It should be interoperable with other clouds, both public and private, using standard application programming interface (API).

Policy-driven services – It should allow the storage administrator to define policies that would be applicable to storage services. For example, the administrator should be able to specify different levels of authentication and automation for different services.

Fully audited services – It should provide for tracking of all operations performed on the private storage cloud by keeping a record in a secure audit log.

Charge back/show back – It should provide the storage administrator the capability to associate charge back or show back information to both the storage provisioned as well as the storage services performed in a manner fully compatible with the enterprise’s existing accounting system.