The Cloud’s Achilles Heel – The Network

SoftNAS began its life in the cloud and rapidly rose to become the #1 best-selling NAS in the AWS cloud in 2014, a leadership position we have maintained and continue to build upon today. We and our customers have been operating cloud native since 2013, when we originally launched on AWS. Over that time, we have helped thousands of customers move everything from mission-critical applications to entire data centers of applications and infrastructure into the cloud. In 2015, we expanded support to Microsoft Azure, which has become a tremendous area of growth for our business.

By working closely with so many customers with greatly varying environments over the years, we’ve learned a lot as an organization – about the challenges customers face in the cloud – and getting to the cloud in the first place with big loads of data in the hundreds of terabytes to petabyte scale.

Aside from security, the biggest challenge area tends to be the network – the Internet. Hybrid cloud uses a mixture of on-premises and public cloud services with data transfers and messaging orchestration between them, so it all relies on the networks. Cloud migrations must often navigate various corporate networks and the WAN, in addition to the Internet.

The Internet is the data transmission system for the cloud, like power lines distribute power throughout the electrical grid. While the Internet has certainly improved over the years, it’s still the wild west of networking.

The network is the Achilles heel of the cloud.

Developers tend to assume that components of an application are operating in close proximity of one another; i.e., a few milliseconds away across reliable networks, and if there’s an issue, TCP/IP will handle retries and recover from any errors. That’s the context many applications get developed in, so it’s little surprise that the network becomes such a sore spot.

In reality, production cloud applications must hold up to higher, more stringent standards of security and performance than when everything ran wholly contained within our own data centers over leased lines with conditioning and predictable performance. And the business still expects SLA’s to be met.

Hybrid clouds increasingly make use of site-to-site VPN’s and/or encrypted SSL tunnels through which web services integrate third party and SaaS sites and interoperate with cloud platform services. Public cloud provider networks tend to be very high quality between their data center regions, particularly when communications remain on the same continent and within the same provider. For those needing low-latency tunnels, AWS DirectConnect and Azure ExpressRoute can provide additional conditioning for a modest fee, if they’re available where you need them.

But what about the corporate WAN, which are often overloaded and plagued by latency and congestion? What about all those remote offices, branch offices, global manufacturing facilities and other remote stations that aren’t operating on pristine networks and remain unreachable by cost-effective network conditioning options?

Latency, congestion and packet loss are the usual culprits

It’s easy to overlook the fact that hybrid cloud applications, bulk data transfers and data integrations take place globally. And globally it’s common to see latencies in the many hundreds of milliseconds, with packet loss in the several percent range or higher.

In the US, we take our excellent networks for granted. The rest of the world’s networks aren’t always up to par with what we have grown accustomed to in pure cloud use cases, especially where many remote facilities are located. It’s common to see latency in the 200 to 300 milliseconds range when communicating globally. When dealing with satellite, wireless or radio communications, latency and packet loss is even greater.

Unfortunately, the lingua franca of the Internet is TCP over IP; that is, TCP/IP. Here’s a chart that shows what happens to TCP/IP in the face of latency and packet loss resulting from common congestion.

The X axis represents round trip latency in milliseconds, with the Y axis showing effective throughput in Kbps up to 1 Gbps, along with network packet loss in percent along the right side. It’s easy to see how rapidly TCP throughput degrades when facing more than 40 to 60 milliseconds of latency with even a tiny bit of packet loss. And if packet loss is more than a few tenths of a percent, forget about using TCP/IP at all for any significant data transfers – it becomes virtually unusable.

Congestion and packet loss are the real killer for TCP-based communications. And since TCP/IP is used for most everything today, it can affect most modern network services and hybrid cloud operation.

This is because the TCP windowing algorithm was designed to prioritize reliable delivery over throughput and performance. Here’s how it works. Each time there’s a lost packet, TCP cuts its “window” buffer size in half, reducing the number of packets being sent and slowing the throughput rate. When operating over less than pristine global networks, sporadic packet loss is very common. It’s problematic when one must transfer large amounts of data to and from the cloud. TCP/IP’s susceptibility to latency and congestion render it unusable. This well-known problem has been addressed on some networks by deploying specialized “WAN Optimizer” appliances, so this isn’t a new problem – it’s one IT managers and architects are all too familiar with and have been combating for many years.

Latency and packet loss turn data transfers from hours into days, and days into weeks and months

So even though we may have paid for a 1 Gbps network pipe, latency and congestion conspire with TCP/IP to limit actual throughput to a fraction of what it would be otherwise; e.g., just a few hundred kilobits per second. When you are moving gigabytes to terabytes of data to and from the cloud or between remote locations or over the hybrid cloud, what should take minutes takes hours, and days turn into weeks or months.

We regularly see these issues with customers who are migrating large amounts of data from their on-premises datacenters over the WAN and Internet into the public cloud. A 50TB migration project that should take a few weeks turns into 6 to 8 months, dragging out migration projects, causing elongated content freezes and sending manpower and cost overruns through the roof vs. what was originally planned and budgeted.

As we continued to repeatedly wait for customer data to arrive in the public cloud to complete cloud migration projects involving SoftNAS Cloud NAS, we realized this problem was acute and needed to be addressed. We had many customers approach us and ask us if we had thought about helping in this area – as far back as 2014. Several even suggested we have a look at IBM Aspera, which they said was a great solution.

In late 2014, we kicked off what turned into a several year R&D project to address this problem area. Our original attempts were to use machine learning to automatically adapt and adjust dynamically to latency and congestion conditions. That approach failed to yield the kind of results we wanted.

Eventually, we ended up inventing a completely new network congestion algorithm (that’s now Ultra pending patent) to break through and achieve the kind of results we see below.

We call this technology “UltraFast™.”

As can be easily seen here, UltraFast overcomes both latency and packet loss to achieve 90% or higher throughput, even when facing up to 800 milliseconds and several percent packet loss. Even when packet loss is in the 5% to 10% range, UltraFast continues to get the data through these dirty network conditions.

I’ll save the details of how UltraFast does this for another blog post, but suffice it to say here that it uses a “congestion discriminator” that provides the optimization guidance. The congestion discriminator determines the ideal maximum rate to send packets without causing congestion and packet loss. And since TCP/IP constantly re-routes packets globally, the algorithm quickly adapts and optimizes for whatever path(s) the data ends up taking over IP networks end-to-end.

What UltraFast means for cloud migrations

We combine UltraFast technology with what we call “Lift and Shift” data replication and orchestration. This combo makes migration of business applications and data into the public cloud from anywhere in the world a faster, easier operation. The user simply answers some questions about the data migration project by filling in some wizard forms, then the Lift and Shift system handles the entire migration, including acceleration using UltraFast. This makes moving terabytes of data globally a simple job any IT or DevOps person can do.

Additionally, we designed Lift and Shift for “live migration”, so once it replicates a full backup copy of the data from on-premise into the cloud, it then refreshes that data so the copy in the cloud remains synchronized with the live production data still running on-premise. And if there’s a network burp along the way, everything automatically resumes from where it left off, so the replication job doesn’t have to start over each time there’s a network issue of some kind.

Lift and Shift and UltraFast take a lot of the pain and waiting out of cloud migrations and global data movement. It took us several years to perfect it, but now it’s finally here.

What UltraFast means for global data movement and hybrid cloud

UltraFast can be combined with FlexFiles™, our flexible file replication capabilities, to move bulk data around to and from anywhere globally. Transfers can be point-to-point, one to many (1-M) and/or many to one (M-1). There is no limitation on the topologies that can be configured and deployed.

Finally, UltraFast can be used with Apache NiFi, so that any kind of data can be transferred and integrated anywhere in the world, over any kind of network conditions.

SUMMARY

The network is the Achilles heel of the cloud. Internet and WAN latency, congestion and packet loss prevent hybrid cloud performance, timely and cost-effective cloud migrations and slow global data integration and bulk data transfers.

SoftNAS’ new UltraFast technology, combined with Lift and Shift migration and Apache NiFi data integration and data flow management capabilities yield a flexible, powerful set of tools for solving what have historically been expensive and difficult problems with an purely software solution that runs everywhere; i.e., on VMware or VMware-compatible hypervisors and in the AWS and Azure clouds. This powerful combination puts IT in the driver’s seat and in control of its data, overcoming the cloud’s Achilles heel.

NEXT STEPS

Visit Buurst, Inc to learn more about how SoftNAS is used by thousands of organizations around the world to protect their business data in the cloud, achieve a 100% up-time SLA for business-critical applications and move applications, data and workloads into the cloud with confidence. Register here to learn more and for early access to UltraFast, Lift and Shift, FlexFiles and NiFi technologies.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rick Braddy is an innovator, leader and visionary with more than 30 years of technology experience and a proven track record of taking on business and technology challenges and making high-stakes decisions. Rick is a serial entrepreneur and former Chief Technology Officer of the CITRIX Systems XenApp and XenDesktop group and former Group Architect with BMC Software. During his 6 years with CITRIX, Rick led the product management, architecture, business and technology strategy teams that helped the company grow from a $425 million, single-product company into a leading, diversified global enterprise software company with more than $1 billion in annual revenues. Rick is also a United States Air Force veteran, with military experience in top-secret cryptographic voice and data systems at NORAD / Cheyenne Mountain Complex. Rick is responsible for SoftNAS business and technology strategy, marketing and R&D.

The IT Archaeological Dig of Technology and the Cloud

by Buurst Staff | AWS, Microsoft Azure

The IT Archaeological Dig of Technology and the Cloud

I must admit something right up front here – I love technology! I’m a techno-geek on most every level, in addition to having done a lot of other stuff in my career and personally with technology. Most people don’t know, but I recently got my ham radio license again after being inactive for 45 years… but that’s another story. One of my latest radio projects I’ve been working on after hours for almost a year involves what is essentially an IoT device for ham radio antennas.

I find technology relaxing and satisfying, especially electronics, where I can get away from the stresses of business and such and just focus on getting that next surface mount component properly soldered. Given my busy schedule, I make slow but unrelenting progress on these types of background projects, but it beats wasting away in front of the TV. In fact, I should probably order one of these hats from propellerhats.com and wear it proudly.

As a bit of background on this blog post, when I was CTO at CITRIX Systems, I used the term “archaeological dig of technology” to describe the many layers of technology deposits that I saw our customers had deployed and that we continue to see companies dealing with today. The term caught on internally and even our then CEO, Mark Templeton, picked up on and it and used it from time to time, so the term stuck and resonated with other technologists over the years. Mark and I had a friendly competition going to see who could come up with the coolest tech. Mark usually won, being the real chief propeller head. We had a lot of fun winning and growing CITRIX together in those days…

So, what do I mean by the Archaeological Dig of Technology aka “The Dig”? I would describe it as the sum total of technologies that have been deposited within an enterprise over time.

The Dig is the result of buying and deploying packaged applications, in-house applications, external service integration, mergers and acquisitions and other forms of incrementalism adding technology acquisition and automation to our businesses over time. It’s surprising how much technology accumulates with time.

The following diagram attempts to depict a typical dig one might find at companies today. It’s by no means complete, but merely attempts to illustrate some of the components and complexities involved. For most, this is probably an oversimplified perspective highlighting the types of technologies and related issues that have accrued.

What we see above is a complex set of application stacks running across virtual machines, physical servers, and data stored across various proprietary vendor storage gear. There’s numerous hard-coded data integration paths across applications, technology stacks and SaaS providers, tentacles to and from remote offices, branch offices and offshore manufacturing facilities spread around globally. The challenge with global data and the cloud is the latency and congestion that limits us over the WAN and Internet.

File servers have proliferated around the world into most every nook and cranny they could fit. And now there’s so much data piling up to be protected that for many large enterprises, weekly full backups have turned into monthly backups and the wall of data keeps getting higher. Customers tell us that they see the day coming when even monthly full backups won’t be feasible. The costs continue to mount and there’s no end in sight for most growing companies today.

For large enterprises, the term “dig” doesn’t adequately describe the full breadth and depth of the technological sediment involved, which is truly expansive. For these companies, there are numerous Digs, spread across many data centers, subsidiaries and physical locations – and clouds.

For small to medium size companies, it’s amazing how many types of technologies we have deployed and integrated together to run our businesses. While much less complex than The Digs of larger enterprises, relative to our size our digs are often just as challenging with our limited resources, and are often outsourced to someone else to deal with.

If we think about the bottommost layer of The Dig as the earliest forms of technology we acquired, for many that is still the mainframe. It’s amazing how many companies still rely on mainframe technology for much of their most critical transaction processing infrastructure. This brings with it various middleware that links mainframe beast computing with everything else.

Unlike minicomputers, which went the way of the dinosaur quickly, client-server and PC era technologies followed and stuck, comprising a large portion of most enterprises’ digs today. Citrix helped hundreds of thousands to organize and centralize most of the client-server layer, so it’s now contained in the data centers and continuing to serve the business well today.

Web technology layers came next and became a prevalent layer that remains centralized for all users, ranging from B2C, B2B and B2E via SaaS layers that sit outside our data centers in someone else’s digs.

Then we realized we have too many servers and they’re not all busy doing work, yet they take up space and cost money to maintain and power up 24 x 7. Enter the virtualization and server consolidation era, and the next major new layer reorganized The Dig into a more manageable set of chunks affectionately known as Virtual Machines. VM’s made life sweet, because we can now see most of The Dig on one console and manage it by pushing a few buttons. This is very cool! VMware ushered in this era and owns most of this layer today.

Of course, Apple, Google and others ushered in the mobile computing era, another prevalent and recent layer that’s rapidly evolving and bringing richness to our world. To make things easier and more convenient, Wi-Fi and 3G then 4G and next 5G wireless networks came to the rescue to tie it all together for us and make our tech world available 24 x 7 everywhere we go.

IoT is now on the horizon and promises to open amazing new frontiers by melding our physical world increasingly with the virtual one we work and live in. We have the Big Data and data warehouses and analytics systems to try and make sense of everything, as the number of layers and complexity of The Dig becomes overwhelming as it accelerates in size, data growth and the intensity of complexity stresses our abilities to understand, manage and keep it all secure. Speaking of security, there’s entire other layers which are there solely so The Dig doesn’t get infiltrated and pilfered endlessly.

Unfortunately for many, as we have seen all too often in recent news, for some The Dig has been penetrated by hackers, exposing some of our most precious personal information to the bad guys. As if that’s not disturbing enough, we find out that encryption, that layer which insulates us from the bad guys in cyberspace, is compromised at the edge with our Wi-Fi devices!

So, what’s the next layer? Obviously, the clouds, machine learning and someday real Artificial Intelligence. And we already hear the pundits telling us that AI will change everything! Of course, it will. Maybe it will figure out how to reorganize The Dig for us, too!

Underneath these big animal picture layers, we have the actual underlying technologies. Now I’m not going to attempt to provide a complete taxonomy or list here, but it’s the entire gamut of devices and appliances deployed today, including mainframes, middleware, client-server, virtual servers, cloud servers, Citrix servers, provisioning and deployment tools, systems management, e-commerce systems, networking, firewalls, plus programming tools and stacks (.NET, JAVA, MFC, C++, PHP, Python, …) and traditional operating systems like Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Android, … and the list just keeps going (way too long to list here).

What I find most amusing is how the vendor marketing hype cycle invariably tries to convince us that this latest technology wave will be the “be all, end all” that will take over and replace everything! Nope – not even close. It’s just the next layer of The Dig being promoted for immediate adoption and installment. It will either replace an earlier layer or (more likely) add a new layer atop the existing Dig and bring with it new tentacles of integration and complexities of its own.

Perhaps an obvious question to ask is “how could this happen?” or “what can be done to keep The Dig from spiraling out of control?” or “who’s responsible for this and making sure it doesn’t happen?”

My guess is we may not like the answers to those kinds of questions. It happens because companies need to compete, adapt and move quickly to grow. Each technology acquisition decision is usually treated as a discrete event that addresses a current set of priorities and issues evaluated in isolation, but nobody is truly responsible for or capable of managing The Dig strategy overall. I mean, who has the title “The Dig Director” or “The Chief Dig Officer”?

Ultimately, IT is typically held responsible for keeping The Dig running, updated, patched, secured, performing well, available and operational to meet the business’ needs. IT is sometimes, but certainly not always, consulted about the next set of layers that are about to be deposited. But increasingly, IT inherits the latest layers and admits them into The Dig and becomes the custodian who’s responsible for running and maintaining it all (with something like 2% to 3% annual budget increase).

So where does “the cloud” fit into this picture? Good question. I suspect if you ask some, they will tell you “finally, the cloud is the one that will replace them all!” Right. Of course, it will. I mean, we’ve been waiting for a long time, surely this must be it! The Dig will be completely “digitally transformed”, replacing all that those other messy, pesky layers that we no longer want or respect like we once did.

Others will probably say the cloud is just one of many IT strategies we have, which is probably closer to reality for most companies, at least over the short haul.

I wish it were really that simple. In reality, “the cloud” isn’t a single thing. There’s public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds and SaaS clouds – and each one is yet another layer coming to pile onto The Dig and create a new set of interesting technologies for us moving forward. Most companies can only muster enough budget and resource to rewrite a few apps per year to “digitally transform” pieces of The Dig into the new world order we seek. Alas, rewriting all the apps to Java didn’t work out in the end, so can we really digitally transform everything before the next big thing appears to disrupt our progress?

Multi-cloud is the next reality coming to The Dig near you. The facts are that most companies expect to deploy across many different clouds (up to 10 or more!) and link everything together via various “hybrid cloud” layers… just a friendly heads up – it’s coming soon to The Dig near you. As shown below, industry analysts tell us that 80% of the decision-makers are already committed to adding hybrid clouds and 60% expect to operate multi-cloud environments in 2018.

This means we know what’s coming next to The Dig near us – more layers.

So, what can be done about The Dig we have today, and the new layers being regularly deposited? For most companies, little to nothing. Each layer serves a purpose, adding value to our businesses. Mergers and acquisitions aren’t going to stop. Business units will continue to hire DevOps and Shadow IT to quickly develop new applications, integrate business processes with new cloud services with multiple vendors and then add it to the corporate technology collective.

For smaller to medium size corporations, there’s hope in that much of their technologies can be migrated to one or more public cloud and SaaS platforms. For others, it’s incrementalism-as-usual – do what we must today, it’ll be someone else’s problem to deal with in the future – there’s no strategy other than survive to live another day.

When we step back and consider what seems like a chaotic process full of uncontrolled variables and incremental decisions, I believe there’s hope to eventually unwind from the hairball architectures and reorganize our respective technology digs to make them more manageable.

One of the keys is “virtualization”. The cloud is really a combination of virtual computing and platform services that’s both backward compatible and forward leaning; meaning, we can migrate our existing VM workloads into the cloud and run them, while we lean forward and create new services and applications by tapping into cloud platform services. But is that the be all, end all that’s needed? Probably not.

We need a “data strategy”. I believe there is an elemental piece that’s been missing – the Data Virtualization layer, a data access and control layer that makes business data more portable across storage systems, clouds, SaaS clouds, databases, IoT devices and the many other data islands we have today and will add to The Dig over time.

To achieve the multi-cloud and hybrid cloud diversity and integration that many believe come next, without creating more brittle hairball architectures, there must be a recognition that “data is the foundation” that everything rests upon.

If data remains corralled up and tied down to discrete, platform-specific “storage” devices, applications will never be truly freed up to become portable, multi-cloud or hybrid-cloud. Even clever innovations like modular micro-services and reusable containers will continue to be platform constrained until the data layer is virtualized and made flexible enough to quickly and easily adapt with the evolution to the multi-cloud.

In future posts, I will share details around the SoftNAS “cloud fabric” vision and what we now call the “Cloud Data Platform”, a data control layer that enables rapid construction of hybrid clouds, IoT integration and interconnecting the existing layers of The Dig across multiple clouds.

The Dig will continue to be with us, supporting our businesses as we grow and evolve with technology. It’s clear at this point that the next set of layers will be cloud-based. We will need to integrate the many existing layers globally with the cloud, while we incrementally evolve and settle into our new digs in the cloud era.

NEXT STEPS

Visit Buurst to learn more about how SoftNAS is used by thousands of organizations around the world to protect their business data in the cloud, achieve a 100% up-time SLA for business-critical applications and move applications, data and workloads into the cloud with confidence. Register here to learn more and for early access to the Cloud Data Platform, the new data access and control plane from SoftNAS.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Consolidating File Servers into the Cloud

by Buurst Staff | AWS, DevOps, Microsoft Azure, Webinars

Cloud File Server Consolidation Overview

Maybe your business has outgrown its file servers and you’re thinking of replacing them. Or your servers are located throughout the world, so you’re considering shutting them down and moving to the cloud. It might be that you’re starting a new business and wondering if an in-house server is adequate or if you should adopt cloud technology from the start.

Regardless of why you’re debating a physical file server versus a cloud-based file server, it’s a tough decision that will impact your business on a daily basis. We know there’s a lot to think about, and we’re here to show why you should consolidate your physical file servers and move your data to the cloud.

We’ll discuss the state of the file server market and talk about the benefits of cloud file sharing. What we’re going to talk about is some of the challenges and some of the newest technologies to step up to the challenges of unstructured data not only sitting in one place but scattered around the world.

Consolidating File Servers into the Cloud from SoftNAS, Inc.

Managing Unstructured Data

The image below is how Gartner looks at unstructured data in the enterprise. The biggest footprint of data that you have as an enterprise or a commercial user is your unstructured data. It’s your files.

That one is where you buy a large single platform that might be a petabyte or even larger to house all of that file data, but what creeps up on us is the data that doesn’t leave in the data, that which isn’t right under your nose and surrounded by best practices. And those who distribute file servers that live around the world, on average an enterprise with 50 locations, be they branch offices, distribution centers, manufacturing facilities, oil rigs, etc, they’ve got 50 or 100 locations, they’re going to have at least 50 or 100 data centers.

The analyst community (Gartner, Forrester and 451) tell us that almost 80% of the unstructured data you’re dealing with actually sits outside of your well protected data center. This presents challenges for an enterprise because it’s outside of your control.

It’s been difficult to leverage the cloud for unstructured data. Customers by and large are being fairly successful moving workloads and applications to the cloud, along with the storage those applications use. However, when you’re talking about user data and your users are all around the world, you’re dealing with distance, latency, network unavailability in general and multiple hubs through routing.

Which has led to some significant challenges, such as having the situation where you’ve data islands popping up everywhere. You have massive amounts of corporate data that’s not subject to the same kind of data management security that you would have in an enterprise datacenter. Including backup, recovery, audit, compliance, secure networks and even physical access.

And that is what has led to a really “bleeding from the neck problem.” That being, how am I going to get this huge amount of data around the world under our control?

Unstructured Data Challenges

These are some of the issues that you find: Security problems, lost files. Users calling in and saying, “Oops, I made a mistake. Can you restore this for me?” And the answer quite often is, “No. You people in that location are supposed to be backing up your own file server.”

Bandwidth issues are significant as people are trying to have everyone in the world work from a single version of the truth and they’re trying to all look at the same data. But how do you do that when it’s file data?

You have a location in London trying to ship big files to New York. NY then makes some changes and ships the files to India. Yet people are in different time zones. How do you make sure they’re all working off of the same version of information? That has led to the kind of problems driving people to the cloud. Large enterprises are trying to get to the cloud not only with their applications, but with their data.

If you look at what Gartner and IDC say about the move to the cloud, you see that larger enterprises have a cloud-first strategy. We’re seeing SMBs (small and medium businesses) and SMEs (small and medium enterprises) also have a cloud-first strategy. They’re embracing the cloud and moving significant amounts of their workloads to the cloud.

More companies are going to install a cloud IT infrastructure at the expense of private clouds. We see customers all the time that are saying, “I have 300,000 sq ft. data center. My objective is to have a 100,000 sq ft. data center within the next few months.”

NAS/SAN vs. Hyperconverged vs. The Cloud

And so many customers are now saying, “What am I going to do next? My maintenance renewal is coming up. My capacity is reaching its limit because unstructured data is growing in excess of 30% annually in the enterprise. So what is the next thing am I going to do?”

Am I going to add more on-premise storage to my files? Am I going to take all of my branch offices that are currently 4 terabytes and double them to 8 terabytes?

You probably have seen the emergence of hyperconverged hardware — single instance infrastructure platforms that do applications, networking and storage. It’s a newer, different way of having an on-premise infrastructure. With a hyperconverged infrastructure, you still have some forklift upgrade work both in terms of the hardware platform and in terms of the data.

Customers that are moving off of traditional NAS and SAN systems onto hyperconverged have to bring in the new hardware, migrate all the data, get rid of the old hardware, so it’s still lift and shift from a datacenter as well as a footprint.

Because of that, a lot of SoftNAS customers are asking, “Is it possible to do a lift and shift to the cloud? I don’t want to get the infrastructure out of my data center and out of my branch offices. I don’t want to be in the file server business. I want to be in the banking, or the retail, or the transportation business.”

I want to let the cloud providers — Azure, AWS, or Google — to use their physical resources, but it’s my data and I want everybody to have access to it. That’s opened the world to a lift and shift into a cloud-based infrastructure. That means you and your peers are going through a pros and cons discussion. If you look at on-premises versus hyperconverged versus the cloud, the good news is all of them have an secure infrastructure available. That could be from the level of physical access, authentication and encryption – either in-transit or at-rest or in-use, all the way down to rights management.

What you’ll find is that all the layers of security apply across the board. In that area, cloud has become stronger in the last 24 months. In terms of infrastructure management — which is getting to be a really key budget line item for most IT enterprises — for on-premise and hyperconverged, you’re managing that. You’re spending time and effort on physical space, power, cooling, upgrade planning, capacity planning, uptime and availability, disaster recovery, audit and compliance.

The good news with the cloud is you get to off load that to someone else. Probably the biggest benefit that we see is in terms of scalability. It’s in terms of the businesses that say, “I have a pretty good handle on the growth rates of my structured data but my unstructured data is a real unpredictable beast. It can change overnight. We may acquire another company and find out we have to double the size of our unstructured data share. How do I do that?” Scalability is a complicated task if you’re running an on premise infrastructure.

With the cloud, someone else is doing it — either at AWS, Azure, Google, etc. From a disaster recovery perspective, you pretty much get to ride on the backs of established infrastructure. The big cloud providers have great amounts of staff and equipment to ensure that failover, availability, pointing to a second copy, roll-back etc, has already been implemented and tested.

Adding more storage becomes easy too. From a financial perspective, the way you pay for an on-premise environment, is you buy your infrastructure and you use it. It’s the same thing with hyperconverged. Although, they have lower price points than traditional legacy NAS and SAN. But the fact is only the cloud gives you the ability to say “I’m going to pay for exactly that I need. I’m not buying 2 Terabytes because I currently need 1.2 Terabytes and I’m growing 30% per annum.” If you’re using 1.2143 terabytes, that’s what you pay for in the cloud.

A Single Set of Data

But just as important, they have found out that there is a business use-case. There is the ability to do things from a centralized consolidated cloud viewpoint which you simply cannot do from the traditional distributed storage infrastructure.

If you think about what customers are asking for now, more and more enterprises are saying “I want centralized data.” That’s one of the reasons they’re moving to the cloud. They want security. They want to make sure that it’s using best practices in terms of authentication, encryption, and token management. And whatever they use has to be able to scale up for their business.

But how about from a use case perspective? You need to make sure you have data consistency. Meaning, if I have people on my team in California, New York and London, I need to make sure they’re not stepping on each other’s work as they collaborate on projects.

You need to make sure you have flexibility. If you’re getting rid of old infrastructure in 20 or 30 branch offices, then you need to get rid of them easily and quickly spin up the ability for them to access centralized data within minutes. Not within hours and weeks of waiting for new hardware to come in.

Going back to data consistency, if I’m going to have one copy of the truth that everyone is using, I need to make sure that I have that distributed files working. Because face it, that what file servers do. That is the foundation of file servers since they were invented in the market. Those are the type of benefits that are being brought to bear by people that move their file servers into the cloud. They cut costs and increase flexibility.

Cloud File Server Reference Architecture

Here’s an example. In the image below, a SoftNAS customer needed to build a highly available 100 TB Cloud NAS on AWS. The NAS needs to be accessed in the cloud via a CIFS protocol and they need to have data elsewhere. Not the primary location, but they need to have across the region and different continents.

They needed to have to have access from the remote office. Also, they need Active Directory and giving them a need to have them for the help build a new space with the district file locking as well.

The solution provided along with Talon FAST, deployed two instances in UFCs. In this case in two separate zones — control A deployed in one zone and control B deployed in the second zone. We leveraged S3 and EBS for different type of applications for their SLA.

We set up replication between two nodes so the data is available in two different places and is within the zone. We deployed HA on top of it to give that availability with minimal down time. So we give you that flexibility to migrate data or flip to another node without management intervention.

Next Steps

You can also try SoftNAS Cloud NAS free for 30 days to start consolidating your file servers in the cloud:

Sneak Peek: See How SoftNAS Reduces Storage Costs While Increasing Scale and Security

by Buurst Staff | Microsoft Azure

SoftNAS Reduces Storage Costs Using Azure Blob Storage While Increasing Scale and Security

A core benefit of using cloud storage is getting the data center hardware monkey off your back and getting elastic capacity. A challenge of using new cloud paradigm storage mechanisms such as object storage may result in re-engineering applications customers have spent a lot of time and money cultivating. In Azure, the scalable object storage offering comes via Blob Storage offered in both Hot (frequently used data) and Cool (less frequently used data) storage tiers. So, how can you get the benefit of elastic capacity and cost point options and still use the NFS, CIFS/SMB, iSCSI, and AFP file-sharing protocols that Blob Storage doesn’t provide?

As we continue our efforts to expand Microsoft Azure’s storage capabilities, we’re introducing exciting new features to make Microsoft Azure Blob Storage even easier to use. With the upcoming release of SoftNAS, customers will be able to frontend the Blob Storage provided by Azure with NFS, CIFS/SMB, iSCSI, and AFP file sharing protocols. See the video below for a sneak peek of how SoftNAS frontends Azure Blob Storage.

Using SoftNAS to frontend Blob Storage has a number of advantages including:

Highly Scalable: Customers can scale cloud NAS deployment from Gigabytes to Petabytes, supporting up to 16PB
No Application Re-coding: SoftNAS allows easy workload migrations to the Azure cloud without changing existing application code, data structures or workflows.
Improved Flexibility: Customers can create SoftNAS volumes using the Blob Storage tiers with the right mix of price and performance that best meets their needs.

blob storage types

Customers can also leverage support for the Hot and Cool Storage tiers for Blob storage with:

Azure Cool Blob Storage – Object storage that allows economical safe-keeping of less frequently accessed data.
Azure Hot Blob Storage – Object storage that optimizes frequently accessed stored data to enable continuous IO.
Azure General Purpose Storage and Azure Premium Storage – For higher performance workloads.

As the capabilities of SoftNAS on Azure continue to grow, we’re excited to show you more of our upcoming features.

Moving your On-Premises NAS to the Azure Cloud

by Buurst Staff | Microsoft Azure, SoftNAS Cloud NAS

On-Premises NAS to the Azure Cloud

Missed our webinar on “Moving your On-Premise NAS to the Azure Cloud?” Remember to click the button below to test drive SoftNAS Cloud NAS on Microsoft Azure today.

See the slides on SlideShare: Click here

Introduction

Today we’re going to talk about moving from a physical NAS device to the Microsoft Azure Cloud. We’ll cover some of the advantages of using Azure for your cloud storage needs. This is not a new concept. It’s on-premise versus the cloud. Microsoft Azure gives us the option to have VMs running inside of our repository and accessing our virtual NAS, SoftNAS gives you network access control towards all your storage needs within a packaged, usable space.

So how does this benefit us? We have a few use cases we want to highlight below for Azure Storage. The use cases are SaaS enables applications, disaster recovery, and hybrid storage.

Microsoft Azure NAS Storage Use Cases

For the first use case, the challenge is needing to SaaS enable a customer-facing application on Azure but the app doesn’t support Blob. They also need AD or LDAP integration for that application, so what would the solution be?

The solution would be to rewrite your application to support Blob and AD authentication. It’s unlikely that that would ever happen, right? So what else could you do? Instead of rewriting the application to support Blob, you can continue to do business the way you always have. Do you need access via NFS? We’ll just support that via NFS through SoftNAS Cloud NAS. Drop all that data on Azure back in, store it in Blob and let us do the translation. Then we could have access for all our applications on-premise or in the cloud to whatever data resources they need. It could be presented with any protocol that’s listed whether it’s CIFS, NFS, AFP, or iSCSI.

Disaster recovery on Azure Cloud Storage using SoftNAS Cloud NAS

What’s our challenge? We’ve got a company that needs reliable and offsite data protection. They’ve already created a big EMC array at their location that they have several years of support left on and they need to be able to meter its use to it. But they need to be able to have a simple integration solution. So what would be the solution? It would be easy to spin out a SoftNAS instance on premise, access that EMC array, and use the data resources for SoftNAS Cloud NAS. We can then present those air repositories to their application servers and end-users onsite and replicate all that data using SnapReplicate into Microsoft Azure. We would have our secondary Blob storage and replicate all the data that’s on-premise into the cloud.

Now what’s great about this solution is it becomes a gateway to where I’m going to get to the end of support on that EMC array. Well, we’ve got this thing running in Azure already. Why don’t we just cut the cord? We could just start directing our application resources to Azure. So that’s a great way to get you moving into the cloud and get a migration strategy moving forward.

Hybrid on Premises Storage Gateway to Azure Cloud

The last use case is hybrid on-premise usage. For example, a company has performance-sensitive applications that need a local LAN. They need off-site protection or a capacity, and the solution would be to set up replication to Azure and then have that expand capacity, so whenever they run out of space on-premise we would then be able to burst out into Azure and create more and more virtual machines to access that data, or maybe it’s a web service account that has a web portal UI or something like that needs just a web presence, and then we’re able to many copies of different web servers that are load-balanced, all accessing their same data on top of Microsoft Azure through SoftNAS NAS Storage. So all these use cases are possible. These are all use cases that I’ve had customers experience today.

SoftNAS Microsoft Azure Cloud NAS Storage

At Buurst, we’ve built our architecture to be flexible and adaptable for the cloud. We’ve built a Linux virtual machine on CentOS. It runs ZFS as our file system on that kernel. We run our systems on open controllable systems that we have staff on-site that actually contribute to these open-source amalgams to make these systems better into CentOS and ZFS and we contribute a lot of intellectual property to help advance these technologies into the future.

We run HTML5 as our admin UI and we have PHP. Apache is our web server and so we have all these open systems to allow us to be able to take advantage of a great open source community out there on the internet. And we integrate with many different service users so if you have customers that are currently running in a different public cloud and they’re looking to migrate into Azure, it’s easy for us to come in and help you make that data migration change because in starting a SoftNAS cloud service into both of those service providers and then migrating that data is simple and easy to do the task.

We can do inline deduplication, caching, storage pools, thin provisioning, writeable snapshots, and SnapClones. We can do compression, encryption, all these different offerings that we’re able to give you in a single packaged NAS solution, so once again all the things that you think you come back in like, “Okay, I’m going to have to install all that stuff and I have to buy all these different components and insert it into my hardware.” Those are all things that are assumed and used, and we’re able to just go ahead and give you our NAS Storage solution.

We’re able to present a storage capacity, so whether it be a CIFS or SMB access medium for Windows users, for some sort of Windows file share, or if it’s an NFS share for some Linux machines, or even just an iSCSI block device or an AFP (Apple File Protocol) for time machine backups, if you have end-users or end devices that need storage repositories of many different protocols, we’re able then to store that data into, say, an Azure Blob storage or even a native Azure storage device.

We’re then able to translate those protocols into an object protocol that is not a native language. We don’t speak in object whenever we’re going through a normal SMB connection, but we do also speak native object into Azure Blob. So we offer the best of both worlds with this solution, just the same as native block devices. We have a native block protocol that we’re able to talk into Azure disks that attach to these machines. We’re able to then create flexible containers that make data accessible to everyone.

Now how does this kind of play out and work in the real world? What we’re going to do is we’re going to present a single IP point of access that all these file systems will land on, so all our CIFS access, all our NFS shares, exports, all the AFP shares will all be enumerated out on a single SoftNAS instance and they will be presented to these application servers and end-users.

The storage pools are nothing more than conglomerations of disks that have been offered up by the Microsoft Azure platform, so whether it’s Microsoft Blob or it’s just native disks, if it’s even another type of object device that you’ve imported into this device, we can support all those device types and create storage pools of different technologies, and we can attach volumes and LUNs that have shares of different protocols to those storage pools so it allows us to have many different connection points to different storage technologies on the back-end, and we do this as a basic translation, and it’s all seamless to the end-user or the end device.

Q&A: Microsoft Azure Cloud NAS Storage

Question 1: What versions of NFS does SoftNAS support?

Answer: We support both version three and four for NFS. Then the follow-up that will be, the question that will be asked is, “What versions of SNB do we support?” We support two and three SNB.

Question 2: What type of RAID does SoftNAS use?

Answer: It’s ‘build your own RAID’. We don’t tell you what type of RAID you have to use. It depends on what your situation is. If you’re inside of Microsoft Azure and you trust their local disk storage is under a low enough AFR that you’re not going to have to worry about RAID in your solution or it’s not that much pressing data, then you can go ahead and use RAID 0 and get the fastest capabilities out of it. But, if you’re on-premise and you don’t have a hardware RAID solution, we give you the ability to use up to RAID 7. So if you wanted to use RAID 6 to give good performance and redundancy at the same time, you’re welcome to do that.

Question 3: How much would encryption inhibit or prevent deduplication benefits?

Answer: So that one, that’s a tricky question, right? Because deduplication actually happens on the fly, so we’re going to be doing the dedupe inline. Encryptions are not going to come into play there, so the encryption’s going to happen on the actual container itself so we’re going to actually encrypt the channel itself and then whenever we drop the data in there it’s going to dedupe.

Question 4: Does SoftNAS provide performance reports to show or see hot vs. cold data volumes?

Answer: We do provide a dashboard that gives you access to all that data. You can come in here and see which data disks are getting hit the hardest, where we have data that are just stored as, and asleep, just never touched. We do have availability access for that dashboard to see that data, and it reports in and we can actually export that via SMTP server. So you can integrate it with SMTP or SNMP via things like WhatsUp Gold or like products.

We hope that you found the content useful and that you gained something out of it. Hopefully, you don’t feel we marketed SoftNAS NAS filer too much. Our goal here was just to pass on some information about moving from your on-premise NAS to the Azure cloud. As you’re making that journey to deploying in the cloud or you’re already operational in the cloud, maybe this webinar saved you time from tripping over some of the things that other customers have tripped over.

Expand Azure Storage Efficiency with SoftNAS Cloud NAS

SoftNAS is a software-defined NAS delivered as a virtual appliance running within Azure Computing Service. It provides NAS capabilities suitable for the enterprise, including high availability utilizing Azure availability sets with automatic failover in the Azure cloud storage. SoftNAS runs within your Microsoft Azure account and offers business-critical data protection required for the non-stop operation of applications, websites, and IT infrastructure. It is designed to support a variety of market verticals, use cases, and workload types. Increasingly, SoftNAS deployed on the Azure platform to enable block and file storage services through Common Internet File System (CIFS), NFS, AFP, and iSCSI. Learn why SoftNAS for Microsoft Azure?

Microsoft Azure Introduces Cool Blob Storage

by Buurst Staff | Microsoft Azure

SoftNAS® is pleased to be part of the Azure Cool Blob Storage offering. Our SoftNAS Cloud NAS customers using Microsoft Azure will get a virtually bottomless storage pool for applications and workloads that need standard file protocols like NFS, CFS/SMB, and iSCSI. By the end of Summer 2016, customers can leverage SoftNAS Cloud NAS with Azure Cool Blob Storage as an economical alternative to increasing storage costs.

SoftNAS helps customers make the cloud move without changing applications while providing enterprise-class NAS features like deduplication, compression, directory integration, encryption, snapshotting, and much more.

Our SoftNAS StorageCenter™ console will allow a central means to choose the optimal file storage location ranging from hot (block-backed) to cool (Blob-object backed) and enables content movement to where it makes sense over the data lifecycle.

What is Azure Cool Blob Storage?

Microsoft Azure Cool Blob Storage is designed for customers with older, less active data, that still needs occasional access. Relative to Hot tier, the Cool tier is suitable for data that is not frequently accessed and can tolerate slightly lower availability (99% SLA).

Some of the common scenarios for Azure Cool Blob Storage include: backup data, disaster recovery, media content, social media photos and videos, scientific data and more. Customers will see significant cost savings by using the Cool tier for appropriate data sets.

Why is Azure Cool Blob Storage Needed?

Today, data stored in the cloud is growing at an exponential – and expensive – rate. An important part of managing the cost for your expanding storage needs is tiering your data based on how often the data is accessed. If you have all your data in one location, you’re paying the same price for all the data, regardless of how much it’s accessed. Doesn’t it make sense to pay less for the data that you rarely use?

As Figure 1 shows, data in the cloud is accessed less and less over its lifetime. Some data is actively accessed and modified throughout its lifetime, but the majority of data sit idle and are rarely, if ever, accessed again.

azure cool blob storage data access

In general, hot data is data that is accessed frequently and needs to be highly durable and available. On the other hand, cool data is data that is rarely accessed and long-lived. Cool data can tolerate a slightly lower availability, but still requires high durability and similar time to access and throughput characteristics as hot data. For cool data, slightly lower availability SLA and higher access costs are acceptable trade-offs for much lower storage costs.

Each of these data access scenarios benefits from a differentiated tier of storage that optimizes for a particular access pattern. Azure Cool Blob Storage with SoftNAS now addresses this need for differentiated storage tiers for data with different access patterns.

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