Cloud Compute and Cloud Storage Architectures

Cloud computing and cloud storage have become the preferred method for delivering information and online functionality. While some cloud services focus on providing consumers with a broad range of services and functionalities, including e-tail shopping, research, social media networking, entertainment consumption and protecting important digital documents, other cloud services focus on small businesses, large enterprises, governments and other institutions.

Various cloud services provide cloud storage to consumers for free, while others charge some type of subscription-based fee. There are also private clouds that are owned and controlled by an organization, providing a secure network for sharing critical software and data. For example, hospitals can choose to use public archiving services for electronic medical records (EMR) and patient image (using PACS) data, or they can create their own cloud archive solution. In addition, hospitals can pool their budgets and resources to create a shared private cloud consortium or group. Private clouds are created using hardware, software and other tools from different vendors, where the actual servers are managed either onsite or offsite. Hybrid clouds, as the name suggests, combine various public and private cloud resources into a service or solution.

At the core of all cloud services, products and solutions are software tools with three underlying pillars of functionality–tools for processing data and running applications (compute servers), moving data (networking) and preserving or storing data (storage).

This article discusses cloud compute and storage architectures, drawing on fundamental enterprise and IT data storage knowledge.

Background and Challenges

Cloud computing and cloud storage have become hot topics for addressing common IT problems and challenges while also enabling new opportunities. For some environments, the primary goal is to cut costs, while for others it is to support growth. Additionally, some environments need to enhance service level objectives (SLOs) as well as meet service level agreements (SLAs) for availability, performance, security and data protection.

Common challenges addressed by cloud solutions include the following:

What are Cloud Solutions?

Cloud solutions are tools for creating and storing content or information, as well as strategies for where and how to consume it. These solutions are used for creating virtual infrastructures for large and small organizations to host applications or business functions, as well as a place to develop and test new capabilities. Additionally, they include pay-as-you-go services or products (hardware, software and networks) and solutions that you can buy to install in your specific environment.

First, here are some common terms and phrases related to cloud solutions:

• Optimized and cost-effective: aligns resources to SLOs to meet SLAs
• Menu of service options to choose from: resource tiering aligned to cost and SLAs
• Elastic, scalable with stability: supports growth without adding complexity
• Resilient, flexible and dynamic: adapting to changing needs and being available
• Rapid or self-provisioning: accesses resources and services quickly
• Secure and multi-tenant: safe separation of users while maintaining data integrity
• Metered and managed: metrics for reporting, analysis and service management
• Scale at density: leverage multi-tenant and economies of scale to cut cost

SaaS to PaaS and IaaS

Also, Software as a Service (SaaS) that is consumed via cloud solutions includes personal or consumer entertainment (Netflix), news and social media networking (Facebook, Skype and Twitter), photo sharing, file sharing (Dropbox), email, music and online backup services.

In addition to providing distinct functionality for consumers, large and small businesses also utilize cloud solutions for improving productivity. For example, document sharing (Google Docs), customer relationship management or CRM (Salesforce.com), expense reporting (Concur), payroll (ADP), email, file sharing, backup and archiving. In addition to presenting SaaS, cloud providers also have tools and environments for Platform as a Service (PaaS) to support development and creating of SaaS services among others.

The types of storage layers for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) include capabilities like Web or virtual machines (VMs), storage for online file sharing, backup or archiving, database, search and development tools. These capabilities enable cloud providers themselves or third parties to create individualized solutions by combining the various cloud functionalities or layers into services provided.

SaaS cloud storage solutions include file, document, music, photo and video sharing, backup/restore, BC and DR, along with archiving capabilities. Other cloud storage options include database, big data analytics (including Hadoop and map-reduce based services), cloud drives and other applications leveraging back-end cloud storage. Cloud storage solutions also extend to products and solutions used for deploying public, private and hybrid clouds.

Products and solutions are the most common cloud storage service building blocks of physical storage systems. Private cloud and public services from SaaS to PaaS and IaaS leverage tiered storage including solid state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs). Similar to traditional enterprise storage environments, cloud services and solution providers leverage a mix of different storage technology tiers which meet different SLO and SLA requirements. For example, using fast SSDs for dense I/O consolidation—supporting database journals and indices, metadata for fast lookup and other transactional data— enable more work to be performed with less energy in a denser and more cost-effective footprint.

Using a mix of ultra-fast SSDs along with high-capacity HDDs provides a balance of performance and capacity to meet other service requirements with different service cost options.

With cloud services, instead of specifying what type of physical drive to buy, cloud providers take care of that by providing various availability, cost, capacity, functionality and performance options to meet different SLA and SLO requirements.

Cloud Architecture

At the heart of legacy IT, hosting, managed service provider (MSP) and clouds are common building blocks, which include networking, processing and storage technologies.

Different types of servers, networks and storage technologies meet various cloud compute and cloud storage requirements (dense rack and blade servers with different numbers of sockets, and cores at various GHz speeds, threads, amount of memory and I/O expansion capabilities are just some examples). Networking options include fast 40GbE and 100GbE for backhaul or trunk circuits, along with the more common 10GbE and 1GbE for virtual private networks (VPN) and bandwidth optimization.

Data storage options or tiers include ultra-fast SSDs, as well as fast medium- and high-capacity HDDs. Storage management features include data protection—high availability (HA), backup (BC) and disaster recovery (DR)— as well as footprint reduction (DFR) for space optimization, such as compression, deduplication and thin provisioning, which enables more information to be stored for longer periods at lower costs.

Software tools are also very important in creating services and solutions, and include APIs, middleware, database, applications, hyper-visors for creating virtual machines (VMs) and virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI), along with cloud stackware, such as OpenStack, and associated management tools. Examples of VMs and VDI hyper-visors include Citrix/Xen, KVM, Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle and VMware ESX/vSphere.

In all three cases, data storage is configured into storage systems, storage appliances and compute servers.

Public clouds are services accessible for free or for a fee providing different functionality, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Docs or Seagate® EVault® data backup software. Public clouds are controlled by their respective owners, whose customers choose to use their services. Private clouds, on the other hand, are owned or operated and controlled by organizations and are similar to legacy IT services delivery. However, note that private clouds built using publicly available components or services and existing off-premises in different cloud provider locations are referred to as hybrid clouds.

Seagate and Cloud Storage

Seagate is the leader in enterprise storage and, not surprisingly, is also at the heart of the cloud infrastructure. Leveraging decades of experience in high-density, large-scale enterprise, institutions, government, managed services and co-location environments, Seagate extends that knowledge to public and private cloud environments. In addition to industry-leading storage technology, Seagate has decades of experience working with various partners and their respective storage solutions, packaging, chassis and enclosures, testing and verification processes.

As a key supplier to private and public cloud and managed services providers, Seagate technology is found in enterprise environments and cloud data centers and in managed service providers to small business and consumers. In other words, Seagate has been enabling cloud compute and cloud storage from the data center to your pocket for some time!

Storage options for cloud compute and cloud storage environments from Seagate include the Pulsar® family of ultra-high performance SSDs. Complementing Pulsar drives are high–performance, 2.5-inch Savvio® 10K and Savvio 15K HDDs for higher-density scenarios, as well as energy-efficient Constellation® HDDs that can support a multiple terabyte configuration.

Table 1 shows how and where Seagate enables public and private cloud computing and cloud storage.

Table 1. How Seagate Enables the Cloud

Summary and Next Steps

There are many cloud solutions, each offering different services, functionalities and capabilities. Clouds services and functionality including compute and storage are combined to enable Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) in public and private cloud solutions. These capabilities can be delivered as a service, as a product, or as a bundled solution, also known as IT as a Service (ITaaS). In addition, cloud services are joined across public and private infrastructures to create hybrid clouds to meet your specific needs and requirements.

The creativity to address your various information needs and requirements are determined by how you or your service provider leverages cloud resources.

Learn more about cloud computing and cloud storage topics in the Solution Center.