Cloud computing is experiencing strong sustained growth across the industry, and the relevance of the emerging cloud market to storage and how the cloud infrastructure is evolving is consequently driving increased demand for storage products.

These Q&As address how Seagate, the world leader in storage devices, plans to strengthen the cloud computing infrastructure and how it will manage environmental operating conditions, workloads, data protection models, security and new storage requirements.

Wes Purdue is the director of enterprise PLM cloud strategy at Seagate Technology. He spoke recently at WHD Global 2012 in Europa-Park Rust, Germany.

Q: When it comes to the cloud computing infrastructure, has the data protection model changed?

Wes Purdue: In traditional IT, RAID has been the predominant data protection model. RAID is also used in cloud infrastructures, but in these large infrastructures, it is not usually a hardware RAID that is the predominant data protection model. It is replication, and it is at least threefold replication. As we develop storage devices over time, we try to address features to improve RAID rebuild — for hot swaps, for hot swapping drives, hot plugging drives — but quite frankly, not all, but a lot of Tier 1 cloud service providers say that they replicate, so we cannot make full use of these features.

Q: Which features cannout fully be utilised?

Wes Purdue: Seagate offers full disc encryption and we have self-encrypting drives, but the cloud guys cannot really use that. They come back and say, “as long as the drive is in our data centre, we feel that the data is pretty well protected. We have what we call guns, guards and gates.” Seagate has an excellent advanced encryption scheme, AES-256, data at rest, but cloud providers tell us, “We really can’t use it that way, and we definitely don’t want a key management system that is complicated, especially in this large scale-out infrastucture.”

Q: But what happens when the drives leave the data centre?

Wes Purdue: That is a challenge. When a drive leaves the data centre, there are two primary scenarios: 1) the drive is repurposed and goes to another site, and 2) the drive is retired and destroyed.

The process usually consists of a third party, external to the data centre, destroying the drive. Of course the data centre will protect the data at all costs before that drives leaves the site. The traditional process has been to wipe the drive, and that takes about 13 hours for a 3TB drive. Drives are usually wiped at least three times. That takes 39 hours, so you are looking at days.

Q: Is there an alternative to the traditional process of wiping the drive?

Wes Purdue: Yes. In fact, Seagate came up with a way to perform an instant secure erase in less than a second. It has a lot of value, especially to these large Internet data centre build-out deployments, and it is consistent with their current security process. Instead of taking 39 hours to wipe a drive in order to secure the data, they can erase the data cryptographically in less than a second. This is another example of taking security technology — our encryption technology — and redeploying it to a feature that fits the need in the cloud space.

Q: What about the need for cold storage?

Wes Purdue: We are hearing from a lot of the large Internet data centres that their customers are saying, “Don’t delete my data, at least not now.” For business purposes and for regulatory requirements, there is more and more data. But even in the cloud, there is archive data, cold data. Service providers are very good at migrating data, and they are asking for a way to migrate data transparently from our warm systems to a cold system, and then back up, bidirectionally, with automated migration. Here is another need in the cloud space in terms of providing a system or a storage device that has the attributes to support this type of a cold storage requirement. Seagate can definitely help here as well.

Q: From a Tier standpoint, how are Seagate products distributed across the cloud?

Wes Purdue: Tier 0 is the high-performance tier, Tier 1 is a balance between performance and capacity, Tier 2 is the capacity-optimised tier and Tier 3 is archival-optimised. These tiers are used across all infrastructures. It is not just a single storage device. There are a number of applications that fall into each of these four tiers.

From a product perspective, whether it is an SSD; a Seagate® Pulsar® drive or Savvio® 15K- or 10K-RPM drive for the compute type of application; or perhaps a Constellation® or Constellation ES 2.5 inch, 3.5 inch nearline/business-critical drive with 3TB and 4TB capacities; all of these types of storage device are used across all different applications. Platform architecture will vary depending on workload, performance and capacity, plus which storage device is optimal for a particular use.

Furthermore, apart from large enterprises, there are small- to medium-sized businesses with NAS devices creating their own little clouds, personal home clouds and even mobile clouds. And those storage devices have a further set of attributes that have to be satisfied for those particular applications.

Q: Finally, what are the keys to success in supporting cloud services?

Wes Purdue: First and foremost, dedicated support is critical. In some cases that means having an engineering team on location at the customer site. Local high-touch technical support is very critical to these service providers. However, what I am seeing is that the smaller builders and integrators understand this need more than the bigger ones.

 Read Part 1 of this article

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