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The Rising Tide of Storage

In recent years, the trade press and national media have been full of stories about massive data growth. As we all know, data storage volumes are rising at a dizzying pace. The growth has been so huge that a new vocabulary and imagery have grown up around it, rich in hyperbole and superlatives. Data growth is now routinely referred to as ‘explosive,’ going off like a bomb; as a ‘deluge,’ the kind of downpour that’s so heavy its blinding; as a ‘tsunami,’ a gigantic wave carrying all before it; or as ‘exponential,’ a term previously limited to mathematics classrooms used to illustrate growth by an order of magnitude, as opposed to an incremental annual percentage rate.

As with any IT megatrend, analysts’ predictions on the exact drivers of this growth may well be a little ‘finger in the air,’ but there is universal agreement on the trajectory: we will all be storing and providing access to much more data. The ‘hockey stick’ graph has become the standard illustration for this growth. The chart below from IDC is typical, showing that the ‘global datasphere’ will reach a staggering 175 zettabytes—a trillion gigabytes—as early as 2025.

Sadly, for the IT storage admin, the IT budget cannot be illustrated as a hockey stick. There is no explosion or tsunami of new money, no blinding deluge of additional Capex, and certainly no willingness from the board to deliver exponential budget increases. In fact, IT teams are routinely asked to do more with less.

Annual Size of the Global Datasphere

175

“When thinking about modernizing and expanding our storage environment, we felt that the traditional appliance approach would be restrictive; instead, we wanted to run open source storage software flexibly on inexpensive commodity hardware.”

Matthias Braun | Head of Delivery SAP at FIS-ASP

How Data Growth Forces Changes in Storage Practices and Vendor Business Models

The twin pressures of storage growth and expenditure control are driving change in the market. Storage admins can see that something has got to give. They know that continuing the old approach of adding proprietary hardware and software from household-name vendors is not going to be sustainable over time and, unsurprisingly, are actively considering new approaches.

This, in turn, makes for an uncomfortable scenario for the big storage vendors. They face huge pressure from customers who want and need storage to be dramatically cheaper. Consequently, this creates reduced brand loyalty as alternatives that deliver lower TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) come up for consideration.

Vendors and IT teams alike are turning to Software-Defined Storage (SDS) as a solution to these pressures.

Decoupling the hardware from the software has consequences for the big-brand storage vendors. When your marketing message comes down to ‘Our software can run on any hardware, so you can save cost by standardising on it,’ it becomes practically impossible to support the idea of ‘premium’ hardware. When it doesn’t matter whose hardware you’re running the software on, savvy IT teams will choose commodity ‘white box’ hardware every time.

For the major storage vendors, this is a time of unprecedented challenge, involving the severe limitation or loss of hardware revenue streams and a dramatic lowering of competitive market barriers to entry. Rivals must now compete on the basis of their software. Enterprises will seek to standardise where possible and limit the number of software platforms in order to reduce complexity and cost. The challenge for traditional vendors is getting enterprises to standardise on their specific flavour of proprietary SDS software, to the exclusion of others. The stage is set for stiff competition, with the losers going out of business or being acquired. This gives rise to an unstable market for buyers, where ‘future proofing’—building infrastructure on solutions with a safe, clear, long-term stability—is a significant challenge.

Software-defined storage provides two immediate advantages:

Decoupling the hardware from the software plane

At a basic level, SDS separates the control plane from the data plane. SDS does for storage what server virtualisation did for compute resources: storage is decoupled from specific applications and supporting hardware can be pooled so that resources are shared. The result is an immediate boost to capacity without adding hardware—an immediate ‘more with less’.

Cost reduction

When capacity is pooled from storage hardware across an environment, storage features can be extended to all arrays. Provisioning becomes simpler and requires less downtime during upgrades and maintenance. As the software works on a range of hardware, costs can be significantly reduced by using commodity hardware.

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“Moving to software-defined storage was an easy decision for us, and SUSE solutions presented the best point of entry for this type of architecture. We saw that switching to a software-defined approach would eliminate the need to manually allocate stores of data to specific hardware and enable us to leverage all the storage devices on our network to maximize availability.”

Howard Samm | Head of Infrastructure for Business Intelligence | Experian

“Other solutions lacked the full range of functionality we were after or locked us into using proprietary hardware. With SUSE we didn’t have to compromise—we got an open, feature-rich solution, with the bonus of full enterprise support.”Marc Herruer | Founder and CEO of Phact

Open Source Software-defined Storage as the Solution to the Data Explosion

Open Source offers two key ingredients that help to meet the data explosion challenge. The first is obvious: deep cost savings, with the sharp reduction not only of hardware costs, but also the elimination of proprietary software costs. The second advantage, perhaps not as obvious, is ultimately more compelling: it’s the enterprise future-proofing that comes with stepping out of the proprietary market share wars and getting on board with a shared development road map and the security that comes with a technology approach that is generally accepted.

Individual enterprises with only modest cost pressures may well prefer (and even in the short term, cope with) the proprietary ‘business as usual’ approach of using existing providers. However, those with the greatest pressures—the most data and the most data growth—will seek alternatives sooner. As the maturity of open source software grows and service providers emerge, offering the skills and support required to get organisations going without technical risk, the TCO arguments grow ever more compelling.

SUSE Enterprise Storage, powered by Ceph, is highly suited to high-bandwidth applications, archive storage, and block storage for virtualisation, but it can really handle pretty much anything. SUSE delivers enterprise-grade features such as erasure coding, thin provisioning, cloning, load-balancing, automated tiering between flash and hard drives, simplified debugging, ease of maintenance, and scale out performance. And, it delivers compelling TCO vs on premise arrays and even the cloud.

Enterprises large and small are turning to SUSE Enterprise Storage not just to reduce costs, but to increase capacity, simplify management, deliver seamless replication and provide scale-out performance.

How Enterprises are Benefiting from SUSE Enterprise Storage

Experian

Few organisations have data management and storage challenges on the same scale as Experian—one of the largest providers of data on consumer and business credit scores in the world. Experian collects and aggregates information on over 1bn people and businesses, including 235m US citizens and 25m US businesses. With 16,000 employees in 37 different locations, Experian is a global data leader.

Experian’s business intelligence unit processes and analyses vast data sets from global sources, transforming the data into industry-leading business insight. So it’s no surprise that maintaining a robust infrastructure with high reliability, strong availability, consistent performance, and sufficient capacity is a major challenge.

“Businesses and individuals rightly expect companies to harness the power of data technology to deliver services round the clock. From the point of view of the business intelligence vertical at Experian, technological development has prompted a change in our customers’ expectations; they want even better, more comprehensive business insights. This change in demand had significant implications for us.”

Howard Samm | Head of Infrastructure for Business Intelligence, Experian

The company’s existing approach, based on ZFS as a primary storage platform, initially performed well. But rapid data growth revealed shortcomings, leading to a need for a more robust solution that would safeguard performance and boost availability.

“We soon found that the surge in data volumes raised concerns around performance and storage capacity, and ultimately threatened to impact the quality of our services.”

Experian faced three challenges:

1. Management complexity. Multiple, separately managed and manually integrated NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices with insufficient performance to meet peaks in demand. A single NAS failure could take the whole system down.

2. Low availability. Earlier projects had established robust business continuity and disaster recovery, but at the expense of a significant degree of automation and responsiveness. As a result, systems couldn’t effectively support the real-time access to data required by API- enabled services.

3. Issues with asynchronous data replication processes. Experian was experiencing long delays caused by large-scale replications—increasing their exposure to data loss. If a disaster event were to occur, core data could be risk.

Experian chose SUSE Enterprise Storage to address the problems caused by rapidly increasing data growth. Management has been simplified, replication windows shortened, capacity increased, stability increased, and the risk of data loss or disruption significantly reduced—all at a significantly lower cost.

“Our SUSE solutions have given us a foundational platform for seamless capacity and performance growth, with a clear path for future development. We are now much better equipped to scale to meet peaks in demand and ensure a consistent, high quality of service for each and every client.”

Phact

IT provider Phact provides hardware and software solutions, as well as infrastructure hosting, support and consultancy services. The company works with a range of vertical sectors and has strong experience in developing solutions for the telecommunications sector.

Telecom providers have particularly demanding needs when it comes to infrastructure hosting. Phact counts amongst its customers a VoIP provider processing close to one million payments a month and generating 400TB of data. Phact maintains and operates their huge landscape, comprising some 2,000 servers housed in 1km3 of space. In total, Phact manages many petabytes of data.

With the business growing rapidly, existing storage at Phact was being pushed to its limits.

“We were rapidly reaching the upper limits of capacity, and a lack of easy scalability meant that we would have to significantly increase budget and management effort to meet growing data demands.”

Marc Herruer, Founder and CEO of Phact

Phact determined that a software-defined storage solution offered an ideal way to bring greater efficiency and flexibility to its storage. After careful consideration, they chose SUSE Enterprise Storage to underpin their new strategic approach.

“In our opinion, SUSE Enterprise Storage offered the total package. While other solutions lacked the full range of functionality we were after or locked us into using proprietary hardware, with SUSE we didn’t have to compromise—we got an open, feature-rich solution, with the bonus of full enterprise support.”

Phact currently has one storage cluster running SUSE Enterprise Storage, located at a client’s private data center. The company has configured 80 x 2TB and 80 x 1TB hard disk drives, along with 48 x 400GB SSDs, with 10Gb Ethernet interfaces—all running on eight DELL PowerEdge R730xd Rack Servers.

The project was new ground for Phact, so being able to call on SUSE for guidance and support has been of great benefit.

“We had a number of meetings with the SUSE team to gain a deeper understanding of how the software worked and to build up our in-house knowledge of the solution. SUSE also worked alongside us to deploy the storage software and configure the underlying hardware.”

Phact plans to add three more SUSE Enterprise Storage clusters within the next year, opening up new opportunities to extend the benefits of software-defined storage to more of its customers.

SUSE has provided Phact with a single, unified, software-defined storage cluster that provides applications with object, block and file system storage, with no single points of failure—optimizing system resiliency. The software has powerful, self-healing capabilities to ensure that mission-critical data remains available.

If one component fails, another will take over automatically, meaning that Phact will only lose capacity, not performance. This helps to maintain very high levels of availability and ensure that end users can reliably access the information and applications they need.

“This means we don’t need to drop everything and rush over to fix the issue; instead, we can make a note to resolve the issue on our next planned visit. As a result, we can minimize the need to make emergency data center trips that are costly and disruptive to our work. We can also plan repair and maintenance activity in a much more effective way.”

As a distributed storage cluster, SUSE Enterprise Storage provides virtually unlimited scalability, enabling Phact to quickly expand storage capacity as and when required.

IRIS

Founded in 1987, IRIS (www.iriscorporate.com) has been a member of the Canon Group since 2013. Headquartered in Belgium, the company has offices in seven countries, working across Europe, America and Asia.

IRIS is a leader in information management, helping organisations to extract, capture and classify information from documents and to export that data into business process applications. As a managed service provider, IRIS is trusted by its customers to support diverse technology platforms: on premise and cloud-based applications and databases, communication and networking systems, data storage, and backup and recovery systems. For many organisations, the cost (in time, money and management focus) of maintaining internal personnel to manage all these technologies outweighs the perceived benefits.

“Our clients want to focus on their core competencies, so they entrust some or all of their IT operations to us—either through support for their on premise technologies or as a fully outsourced service.”

Geert Reynaerts, Delivery Director Hybrid Cloud Solutions & Services at IRIS

IRIS’ clients were increasingly looking for low-cost, highly scalable object storage, particularly for media files and other important but infrequently accessed data—and IRIS wanted to find a cost- effective and risk-free solution for them.

The nature of IRIS’ business means that designing and deploying enterprise storage solutions has always been a major activity. Before working with SUSE Enterprise Storage, the company was already working with a different SDS provider. However, the existing solution’s high licensing fees for third-party software put it out of the financial reach of smaller companies.

“We wanted an alternative approach for clients who liked the SDS concept but couldn’t justify the cost. The open source Ceph solution was promising, but our tests showed that maintaining the solution would be time-consuming, so the saving on licensing would be counter-balanced by additional management costs. By selecting SUSE Enterprise Storage powered by Ceph technology, we gained access to all the benefits of Ceph without any of the downsides.”

Choosing SUSE Enterprise Storage has enabled Iris to meet client demands for fast, resilient, low-cost, mass-data storage with an easy-to-manage, scalable and highly-reliable environment. The architecture naturally delivers exceptional resiliency and availability, thanks to automated optimisation and self-healing capabilities, and enables practically unlimited scalability without downtime.

Swinburne University of Technology

Swinburne University of Technology is a public university based in Melbourne, Australia. Swinburne fosters close ties with industry, business and governmental organizations to help ensure that its degree programs and research find practical applications.

Scientists at Swinburne lead research that is transforming industries, broadening our understanding of the world, and improving lives. Advances in technology have vastly expanded the scope of the university’s research work, which now demands greater compute and storage resources.

The challenge for the IT team at Swinburne is how to accommodate this ever-growing need for performance and capacity while sticking to a tight budget.

“We are always looking for ways to help our researchers work more effectively, which means giving them access to powerful and flexible IT resources. One such example is the National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) Cloud—a cloud platform for Australian researchers, built on OpenStack. NeCTAR Cloud would provide much-needed computing power to our scientists, without the need for us to operate our own servers. However, we had to deploy supporting storage infrastructure on-premises, as latency concerns and data-sharing restrictions prevented us from using a public cloud.”

Simon Naughton, Director of Inftrastructure and Operations at Swinburne

Swinburne recognized that a software-defined approach to storage offered an ideal fit for its needs, as it could deliver high performance and scalability at significantly lower cost than a traditional storage infrastructure.

235-001098-001 | 10/19 | © 2019 SUSE LLC. All Rights Reserved. SUSE and the SUSE logo are registered trademarks of SUSE LLC in the United States and other countries. All third-party trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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