Cost of Storage Infrastructure Will Have A Huge Impact on the Evolution of Cloud
Posted Monday, February 21, 2011 in Technology 0 comments
Issues like performance, ease of provisioning, security, and end user pricing will clearly be key issues, but an issue which underlies all of those is the cost of building out public and private cloud infrastructure.
Because of the flexibility cloud environments demand, virtualization technology is really the only way to deliver on the Cloud approach. Cloud providers will have to focus on creating the most cost-effective virtualized infrastructure to meet their particular customer requirements so that they can price competitively while still generating acceptable margins.
What I think will happen here is that a “standard operating environment” (SOE) will evolve over time that will be quite similar across different cloud providers. This SOE will be built around particular technologies, not particular vendors, that make more efficient use of existing hardware.
Virtualization of servers is already a prerequisite. The single component in that stack that has the biggest impact on infrastructure cost is storage, and traditional storage architectures are particularly inefficient in server virtualization environments. The next wave of virtualization is now focused on storage virtualization, and specifically storage consolidation. Just as the primary driver of server virtualization was server consolidation, the new imperative for IT is to drive down storage costs using new approaches to consolidate storage.
One promising approach to drive down storage costs relies on a new storage virtualization layer that is designed from the ground up to deal with the extremely random I/O patterns that virtual environments generate.
A layer like this, implemented in software in the hypervisor, is easy to deploy and preserves server, storage, and networking hardware as well as hypervisor platform choice, resulting in a cost/server or cost/desktop that traditional storage technologies, which are optimized for the one server/one application model that has been so prevalent over the last 20 years, just can’t touch.
The storage consolidation savings will come from generating more IOPS/spindle of existing storage capacity, better utilization of solid state storage capabilities through tiering, and consuming less storage capacity through thin provisioning.
These factors will increase virtual machine density in these environments and reduce price per unit of computation and storage.
Hosting more servers or more desktops per virtualization host and/or per TB of storage capacity are key variables to manage in keeping virtualization infrastructure costs down. The SOE that evolves for cloud environments will move away from traditional storage architectures as it chases that goal.
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