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Clouds need support of virtualization, says HDS
Clouds need support of virtualization, says HDS
By SMBWorld Asia Editors | Dec 21, 2010
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PrintAs businesses move beyond the hype into largely private clouds and begin the propagation of their business data into these clouds, companies like Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) are aiming to make the transition easier and more secure.
Speaking at their 2010 APAC CIO Summit in Tokyo, Vice President & CTO at HDS Hu Yoshida, said that most customers HDS has spoken to are not sure what the cloud really is but have heard all the hype. “The cloud is another way to deliver services,” Yoshida said, “We try to simplify it for them by sitting down with them and showing them that they have cloud enabled architecture. For those not ready, we try to understand their requirements and work together to determine a deployment that will work for them.”
He explained that adoption of solutions like Salesforce.com which is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution does not always mean that a business is cloud ready. True clouds require the support of virtualized IT infrastructure. A user of the cloud needs to have information on the Service Level Agreements (SLA) for delivery to determine the effectiveness and awareness of how their data will be stored and protected. There could however be problems in integrating such services with internal processes already in place.
According to Yoshida, current cloud drivers are disaster recovery and business continuity planning as a lot of companies in the United States are looking to outsource data and services that can be accessed over the net.
Cloud first steps
With many businesses working to deploy virtualized storage environments, HDS is working closely with technology partners like VMware to make this easier for them.
Yoshida said that storage and server virtualization must be integrated and the company is working closely with all the virtualization vendors to support their API to provide closer integration. “As a result, we were the first to support VMware VAAI for zero format, copy clone, and SCSI reserve offload. Our Hitachi Command Suite software also gives applications a view into our infrastructure so they can track their service level objectives,’ he added.
Meeting the challenges
There are a number of challenges for network managers and CIOs when preparing to move their business into the cloud said HDS.
Network managers who are used to working with networks must appreciate the importance of storage networks that cannot tolerate dropped packets or delays due to congestion. In my view, one of the biggest challenges will be around roles and responsibilities of converged storage and network administrators.
The strategy for the CIO looking at storage is to look at storage virtualization. But this is more than just dropping the load onto the server. Storage has to be able to scale to meet server requirements; It has to be enterprise class to scale properly and failover etc.
Following the recent financial crisis, HDS said that they are seeing customers starting to reinvest in storage as they realize that the demands on storage have not stopped. What is different, Yoshida said is that they more intelligently. Yoshida also said that CIOsare looking at their data and realize that not all is tier one data. “Not all needs to be on high performance and access,” he said, “The rest should be moved to lower cost tiers of storage.”
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