by Greg Scott, Strategic Initiatives Manager at Intel Corporation — November 17, 2010
Interest in cloud computing is growing rapidly as organizations look for new ways to reduce costs and increase the flexibility of IT. For businesses building a private, internal cloud or planning to offer external cloud services, implementing the right storage solution is essential for maximizing that flexibility. Companies need storage solutions that support an on-demand model, providing the right resources at the moment they are needed without excessive costs.
As the Intel Architecture Group and Intel IT showed in the “Cloud on Wheels” demo at Storage and Networking World in October, Compellent Fluid Data Storage provides a strong platform for cloud computing environments. The Compellent solution, powered by Intel® Xeon® processors, offers a virtualized storage area network (SAN) with capabilities that deliver the cost-effective flexibility users expect from cloud environments.
Rapidly scaling capacity with thin provisioning
Like server virtualization, storage virtualization can play a key role in cloud computing. By pooling storage resources, a virtualized solution such as the Compellent SAN can help ensure that applications have the capacity and performance they need, when they need it.
Thin provisioning capabilities, which are integrated into the Compellent SAN, can help optimize capacity utilization within that virtualized environment. With thin provisioning, administrators no longer have to anticipate and pre-allocate storage capacity for each volume. Instead, they can create virtual volumes of any size—applications consume capacity only when data is written. Especially useful in cloud infrastructures, thin provisioning enables administrators to rapidly expand or shrink volumes as usage levels change without having to purchase additional arrays.
Sustaining performance and controlling costs with automated tiered storage
Building a multi-tiered cloud storage environment can help optimize storage performance while controlling costs. With a multi-tiered environment, organizations can take advantage of multiple drive types with varying performance levels. Frequently accessed data stays on high-performance drives, such as Intel® Solid-State Drives, while archival data is moved to more cost-effective drives, such as SATA drives.
With the Compellent SAN, data is written first to high-performance drives by default to ensure the best performance. Automated tiered storage capabilities then automatically migrate block-level data from one tier to another—or one RAID level to another within a tier—based on administrator-set policies. The migration process runs in the background without affecting data availability or application performance. Many organizations can move as much as 80 percent of data to cost-effective drives, helping them cut costs while delivering high performance to the “hot data” or critical data. The benefit, is that the tiering allows highly accessed data to be placed on the performance tier dynamically, without having to configure or provision the data specifically.
Intel Xeon processors help the Compellent platform deliver the intelligence for automated tiered storage. By combining outstanding compute performance with large I/O and memory bandwidth, Intel Xeon processors enable the Compellent controller to continuously collect information about data usage and perform automated data migration without a significant impact on storage performance.
Building a better cloud
Intel is committed to helping organizations capitalize on the vast potential for cloud computing. In addition to providing key technologies for cloud solutions, Intel has launched the Intel® Cloud Builder program to streamline the construction of cloud environments by sharing reference architectures and best practices. As Intel, Compellent, and other companies are already showing, optimizing cloud storage can go a long way toward maximizing the flexibility and cost benefits of cloud computing.
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Editor's note: Greg Scott is a strategic initiatives manager at Intel Corporation who is contributing to the Intel storage strategy for cloud computing. Intel is one of Compellent's technology partners. To read more about the "Cloud on Wheels" demo, check out this press release and blog post.