Advancing the way the world uses the cloud

Beyond EBS – Storage Alternatives in the Cloud

Dave Wright – Founder & CEO

Slides @ http://www.slideshare.net/SolidFireInc

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ApplicationsTest / DevelopmentBackup / ArchiveBasic Web

Cloud OpportunityWhy is block storage so important?

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Performance Sensitive AppsOracle / SAP / SQLHadoop / NoSQLComplex Web apps

Cloud Evolution

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IaaS Cloud Today

Key to bridging the gap: • Better block storage

Better block storage offerings critical to migrating high-margin apps from on-premises, managed, and dedicated environments to the cloud

A Brief History of Amazon EC2 & EBS

2006EC2Launched

• Storage options limited to S3 (object storage) and local instance storage

• “Ephemeral” – no persistence

• Limited performance– “SATA-like” IOPS and bandwidth

– Shared resource (on smaller instances)

• No HA – lose an instance, lose your data

• Fixed capacity – tied to instance size

• Only suitable for custom apps and basic web serving

2008EBS Launched

• Network attached, persistent storage

• Easily move between instances (in an Availability Zone)

• More flexible capacity – 1GB 1TB

• Poor performance– ~100 IOPS, Highly variable latency

• Only for extra data volumes – boot volume still ephemeral

• Failure rate of 0.1-1% (annual) (2 nines)

• Snapshot backup/restore to S3

2009Boot from EBS

• Added ability to store boot volumes on EBS

• Finally allows EC2 instances to be provisioned and used like a “persistent” resource

• Suitable for deploying some persistent, enterprise applications

– If limited performance, durability, and capacity are acceptable

2012Provisioned IOPS

• Added ability to set performance for an individual volume

• Individual volume performance of 100 – 1000 IOPS (fixed at creation time)

• (Likely) SSD based

• Designed for 99.9% performance delivery (but no SLA)

• Suitable for a wider range of performance-sensitive databases and applications

Evolution of EBS

Ephemeral volumes

Developer-oriented

No enterprise apps

Compute centric

EBS

Basic persistent storage

Dev/test and limited production apps

Low IO DBs/apps

Boot from EBS

Fully persistent virtual machines

Basic enterprise apps

Provisioned IOPS

Controlled Performance

Wider range of performance sensitive apps

Where is the rest of the cloud industry?

Object StorageAtmos, Nirvanix,

Scality, Swift

Backup, archival, content repository

Cheap and deep

Instance Storage

Local shared disk

Typically persistent

No HA, limited performance

Network Storage

EMC, 3par, Netapp, Dell

Persistent, HA

Variable performance, No

SLAs, limited scale

The rest of the industry is 3-5 years behind Amazon EBS, working with inferior technology designed for the Enterprise

Traditional Enterprise Storage doesn’t work in the cloud

Performance

• Unable to manage performance independent of capacity

• Can not guarantee storage performance

Efficiency

• Low and inefficient utilization rates

• Lack of high performance in-line data reduction

Management

• Complex manual management that lacks automation

• Limited or Complex DR configuration

Scale

• Limited scalability of both capacity and performance

• Manage multiple islands of storage

Catching up (and passing) EBS

• More control over performance

• Higher durability & availability

• Greater efficiency (profit ↑, prices ↓)

• Complete storage automation

• Cloud scalability

Control over performance

• Manage volume performance and capacity independently

• Guaranteed QoS / sustained performance to every volume

• Dynamic adjustment of provisioned IOPS

• Create and bill against multiple tiers of performance

• Isolate noisy neighbors

• Individual volumes delivering 10k IOPS or more

Higher durability & availability

• 4 - 5 9’s required for enterprise apps

• Remote site replication for DR

• Snapshot & backup support

• Basic RAID insufficient– Long rebuild times

– Significant performance penalty

– Single points of failure

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High efficiency

• High capacity utilization - 85%

• Data Reduction in-line– De-duplication

– Compression

– Thin Provisioning

• Executed without performance impact

• Drastic reduction in power, cooling, and floor space

Complete management automation

• Simple REST-based APIs for storage

• Multi-tenant provisioning, reporting, and performance isolation

• Full feature set – backup, DR, snapshots, etc.

• Comprehensive reporting support & billing integration

• Cloud platform integration

Cloud Scale

• Scale-out rather than scale-up architectures

• Easy to add both capacity and performance

• Support for petabytes of capacity, millions of IOPS, and tens of thousands of volumes

• Avoid islands of storage and manual data management

What role can Flash (SSD) play in improving block storage in the cloud?

Flash Benefits for Block Storage

• Performance– Restore balance between IOPS and Capacity

– Better performance with varied workloads

• Efficiency– Remove performance as a limiter on utilization

– Reduce storage space, power, and cooling

• Management– Better reliability

– Easier to isolate workloads on shared media

What’s the downside?

• Cost– Partially a perception issue

– Can’t be ignored – cloud all about value

• Existing Storage Architectures– Ability to get full performance from flash

– Write amplification & endurance issues

– Inconsistent performance in tiered storage

All-SSD storage solution designed specifically for cloud service providers

• Clustered Scale-Out Architecture

• Industry-Standard: Hardware and 10 GigE iSCSI

• Massive scale: 100 nodes, 2PB, 5M IOPS

• Cost Effective: Usable $/GB similar to traditional SANs

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Phone: 720.523.3278Email: info@solidfire.com

www.solidfire.com

Questions?