Around The Block Blog
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.
For more information
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.
by Liem Nguyen, Director of Communications and Social Media, Dell Storage — October 14, 2010
As VMworld Europe 2010 comes to a close, I wanted to highlight interesting discussions from Copenhagen this year. Compellent was at the Bella Center in Copenhagen with more than 6,000 attendees from 82 countries and one of 113 exhibitors. News highlights include the VMware View 4.5 iPad client, vCentre iPad application and VMware’s Project Horizon, which was announced last month at VMworld in San Francisco but continues to generate excitement.
Much of the buzz has been around the keynote speakers and hands-on labs taking place throughout the course of the show. More than 2,150 labs have already been completed and 19,400 virtual machines have been deployed. The labs have been so popular that blogger Christian Mohn of vNinja.net proposed holding them year-round for customers and partners – I think that’s a pretty cool idea and hope our friends at VMware seriously consider a way to pull this off. There’s been so much hype about cloud computing that it’s important to showcase some real and practical ways to design and create pragmatic solutions. That’s why Compellent is working with Intel and VMware on the “Cloud on Wheels” project.
Matt Roblin of Breathalize.co.uk blogged that VMware’s October 12 keynote from Paul Martiz and Steve Herrod was filled with positive messages, and is happy to see that the company is attacking on a lot of new fronts across the ‘New Stack.’ According to Matt’s post “Thoughts on the ‘New Stack,” VMware is clearly hungry to keep innovating and has a degree of confidence that can help support the company’s expansion.
There’s also a great summary of the Paul Martiz and Steve Herrod keynote from Mike Laverick of www.vibriefing.com, who said that while the keynote was basically the same as the one he’d seen from San Francisco, it was interesting to hear it again for nuances and additional details. That’s sort of like re-reading a great novel.
For on-the-floor sights, check out the VMworldTV YouTube page for video compilation of the first and second days of the show, as well as other tidbits like an interview with VMware’s new European CTO, Paul Strong. There’s also a great social media hub on VMworld.com, where you can get the latest feeds on blog posts, tweets, photos, and videos.
And last, but certainly not least, the Best of VMworld 2010 Europe User Awards were announced, and I'm thrilled to report that one of our Italian customers, Bankadati Servizi Informatic, was named Best Virtualization and Server Consolidation Project. Congratulations to Christian Manzia of Bankadati, Compellent’s channel partner Gruppo Reti S.p.A. and to all the winners. Here's the complete list of the award recipients from VMware’s Tony Dunn:
- Simon Gallagher, vinf.net - Best of Show
- Simon Gallagher, vinf.net - Best Remote Office/Home Office Virtualization Project
- Benny Goedbloed, Belgian Department of Justice - Best Desktop Virtualization Project
- Paul Maddock, Warwickshire College - Best Desktop Virtualization Project Honorable Mention
- Christian Manzia, Bankadati - Best Virtualization and Server Consolidation Project
- Richard Nunan, DNM Technology - Best Private Cloud Computing Project
- Daniel Pfuhl, University Hospital Leipzig - Best Virtualization for Disaster Recovery Project
Over at Tech Target's SearchVirtualDataCentre.co.uk, Lauren Horwitz and Kayleigh Bateman report on all six award winners and document Bankadati’s integration of Compellent Fluid Data in this slide. In honoring Christian, judges said, “Bankadati created more room for applications and data that really need the performance."
Another Compellent end-user, Kim Deleuran, CTO of IT Gaarden, based not too far from Copenhagen, was interviewed by Kayleigh for her cloud computing article on two different viewpoints on creating and managing virtual and cloud data centers: using products from multiple IT vendors or from a single or fewer sources. IT Gaarden, for instance, chose Compellent, VMware Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. for its infrastructure.
What stands out the most to you from VMworld Europe? Do you agree with using best-of-breed solutions for virtualized or cloud infrastructures? Let us know your thoughts.
Sounds like if you didn’t go to Copenhagen you missed a lot. I’m already trying to talk my boss into letting me go to both US and Europe VMworlds next year!
If you want just the links, here they are:
vNinjanet: http://vninja.net/virtualization/extending-vmworld-labs/
Breathalize.co.uk: http://breathalize.co.uk/2010/10/12/thoughts-on-the-new-stack/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Breathalize+%28breathalize%29
VMworld Youtube: www.youtube.com/VMworldTV
VMware community page: http://www.vmworld.com/blogs/vmworld/2010/10/13/best-of-vmworld-2010-europe-user-awards
Search Virtual Data Centre:
http://searchvirtualdatacentre.techtarget.co.uk/news/article/0,289142,sid203_gci1521802,00.html
http://searchvirtualdatacentre.techtarget.co.uk/news/article/0,289142,sid203_gci1521802,00.html
http://searchvirtualdatacentre.techtarget.co.uk/news/article/0,289142,sid203_gci1521812,00.html
by Tim Plaud, Principal Storage Architect, Dell Compellent — October 12, 2010
My name is Tim Plaud and I'm a principal storage architect with Compellent, a partner of Intel. An evolving set of concepts for the better part of four decades, cloud computing has evolved from being a marketing buzz word with little clarity and even less credibility to a real IT strategy built on a set of proven technologies for data centers. Cloud computing now has a stronger-than-ever foothold and it only seems to be getting stronger.
Many end users I talk to understand the value of cloud services, whether the infrastructure to deliver IT as a service is built on-premises or owned by a service provider. However, the big issue for these companies is how they can go about architecting a solution. To help these companies build their own private clouds, we’re working with Intel and VMware to demonstrate a “Cloud on Wheels” solution in the Intel booth (#206) at SNW, taking place during expo hours on Tuesday, Oct. 12 and Wednesday, Oct. 13. Christian Black, researcher and architect, Intel IT, and I will be in Dallas to drive the demos and talk about how the different technology building blocks go together.
I’m excited to have worked with Intel and VMware on Cloud on Wheels, which will combine Intel Xeon 5600 processors, a converged IP/storage fabric on 10Gb iSCSI, VMware virtual servers and vSphere, and Compellent Fluid Data technology. The demo will illustrate how end users can experience the performance advantages of wide-striping and dynamic RAID, as well as the efficiency advantages of thin provisioning and automated tiered storage. In fact, automated tiered storage plays a particularly important role in this private cloud because application data always finds the right level of storage performance and capacity, without requiring any manual intervention. That’s critical for simplifying administration especially if organizations are tight on resources and don’t have a lot of time to manage storage.
Naturally, virtualized storage resources are just one piece of the private cloud puzzle. Cloud environments require the processing power, the virtual servers and the network connectivity to handle scalability, performance and management requirements. With Intel, VMware and Compellent technologies making up the foundation of the Cloud on Wheels solution, all the pieces work together in a self-tuning data center. Customers can manage large pools of IT resources, including networking, storage and servers, as part of an integrated modular, flexible and scalable cloud requiring very little management. After all, isn't that what this whole cloud thing is all about?