Jim McDonald

Chief Strategy Officer, Xiotech

Data Storage for the CloudBalancing Performance, Capacity and Cost

• Most data follows a similar pattern Write, read, ignore

• “Small” amounts of data follow a much more aggressive pattern Write, write, read, write, read, read, write, read, read, read, write, write, write, write, read, write

• The result is that for effective cloud storage you need to have both high capacity and high performance And it needs to be cheaper than could be done in-

house

Storage for the Cloud

• Traditional cloud storage was viewed as a data dumping ground All about $/GB, performance “irrelevant”

• Cloud storage is now becoming a lot more active: File synchronisation Big data Calendars …

• And performance is needed for cloud computing If it can’t do it faster and cheaper it won’t win

Why are the Requirements Changing?

An Unfortunate Side-effect of Capacity Growth

Over the past 10 years, on a

performance/GB basis, drives have

gone down 50x

What Does This Mean?

• A standard enterprise drive can handle roughly: An Exchange server with 125 users @ 2.4GB/user A 300GB database with 12 transactions per second A virtual desktop implementation with 3 users @

100GB/user

• The capacity Vs. performance numbers are very imbalanced against performance For internal IT this is wasted expenditure For cloud service providers this is unobtainable revenue

Performance is the Limiting Factor

• Snapshots

• Thin provisioning

• Deduplication (not compression)

• Traditional tiering

• Housekeeping

Things which Lower Performance

Enterprise storage:10,000 IOPS

• Traditional tiering is a great example of sacrificing performance for capacity Because tiering focuses on

capacity

• Current tiering algorithms are especially bad for heavily-loaded environments Think sat nav before traffic

information

Traditional Tiering

Current tiering solutions are fine if you just want capacity

(But if you just want capacity don’t bother with tiering)

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Archive storage:2,000 IOPS

• Add disks Fine, as long as you don’t use the capacity

• Increase the performance per disk Cache (sometimes) Better understanding of drives Intelligent data placement algorithms

• Tier for performance Use all of the performance of all of the drives

How to Fix This:Increase Performance

• Cloud test suite provides clean copies of every current version of Microsoft Windows Desktop and server, all language patches, all valid

combinations of patches (several thousand instances)

• Automatically uploads program and runs tests, stores results in centralised area, then destroys the VMs

• Performance is the enabler: The time taken to create and destroy the VMs is at the cost

of the service provider and not the customer» So if it can be reduced the service provider makes more money

The time taken to run the tests is a fixed rate» So if it can be reduced the service provider makes more money

Example:Cloud Test Suite

• Stop thinking like it’s 2000 “If I could get all the old data off my enterprise drives I’d

be rich” Capacity is not expensive any more, performance is

• Measure anything other than archive storage in terms of performance not capacity

• Be wary of capacity-increasing (and performance-decreasing) “added value” features Do you really need more capacity and less

performance?

Closing Thoughts

Questions?

Thank You