Forrester report rp-storage-architectures

A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned By NetApp

Private Clouds: Storage Architectures Are Key To Maximizing Efficiencies

February 2011

Forrester Consulting


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Table Of Contents

Executive Summary .............................................................................................................................................................. 2

Understanding The Private Cloud Concept .......................................................................................................................... 2

Conclusions And Best Practices ........................................................................................................................................... 7

Appendix A: Survey Methodology And Demographics ...................................................................................................... 9

Appendix B: Supplemental Material And Endnotes .......................................................................................................... 10

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Executive Summary

Today, enterprises across the world are crafting cloud strategies and starting to invest in private clouds to take

advantage of the economic benefits that cloud models offer. In fact, Forrester found that 29% of enterprises

consider building a private cloud a high or critical priority.1 The more interesting finding, however, is that although

enterprises greatly desire the economic benefits from a cloud model, those who have implemented a private cloud

are not taking full advantage of those benefits. Why? Well, we discovered that it’s primarily due to two reasons: 1)

lack of understanding about what a true cloud model consists of, and 2) underestimation of the critical components

that make up a true private cloud (i.e., storage).

In fall 2010, NetApp commissioned Forrester Consulting to scientifically qualify the notion that companies lack

clear understanding about clouds and hence underestimate the key components that are required to achieve

maximum benefit from a cloud strategy. This paper reflects the results from a study of 150 US enterprise IT

decision-makers who were surveyed about their private cloud interests and implementations. You will find that our

study yielded three key findings:

Decision-makers are, in fact, confused about private clouds and traditional virtualized environments.

Private clouds are shared, highly standardized, and automated environments with self-service access to these

resources. Of the 150 IT decision-makers surveyed, 27% said they were running a private cloud; however,

the majority did not recognize these key characteristics and described their clouds like their traditional

virtualization environments. For example, 54% anticipated providing the same tiers of service for different

applications deployed within the cloud and the full breadth of storage options with little standardization or

automation. In fact, only 17% of cloud users thought a private cloud would affect their traditional

architecture deployments or environment options at all, showing a clear disconnect.

Storage is treated as “business as usual.” Most survey respondents (73%) expected their cloud to save

them money, but only 37% expected their cloud storage to be more efficient. Why the disconnect? The

respondents showed little understanding of how the storage in their private cloud would (or should) differ

from traditional storage implementations. We know this because only 20% of cloud users said they offer

standardized cloud storage options. We also found that 66% of cloud users planned to build their private

clouds atop their existing storage assets, and for 50% of respondents, this means their existing, high-cost

SAN infrastructures. Taking a “business as usual” approach to storage will limit your benefits from a cloud

model and cost you more money in the long run.

Storage is not a key consideration in the decision-making process. It’s not surprising most cloud

administrators (73%) have server/virtual server experience, whereas only 29% have core experience in

storage administration. But what’s alarming is that storage administrators aren’t included in the upfront cloud

architecture and design decisions. When it came to the decision-making, only 14% of respondents included

storage administrators in private cloud platform selection, and only 21% included them in storage equipment

and storage management software selections. Neglecting to involve storage administrators in key decision-

making processes is a red flag for cloud inefficiency.

Understanding The Private Cloud Concept

Building a private cloud has to start with a basic understanding of how a cloud differs from a traditional virtualized

environment. Forrester defines cloud computing as:



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A standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered in a pay-per-use, self-

service way.

In most cases, a private cloud is a shared IT infrastructure set up in your corporate data center and dedicated to just

your company. Let’s break down the cloud computing definition to better understand its implications to IT

operations:

Standardized capability. The value of a cloud comes in the flexibility it brings to the business — how

rapidly and predictably you can deploy applications to this infrastructure. That value comes from

provisioning and managing the environment in a consistent manner every time. You do that by standardizing

what you deploy — which means prioritizing user options — and by automating as many processes as

possible. It’s not customized or configured uniquely for each client, each time — that raises complexity,

slows down processes, and is much harder to make repeatable. There may be options for consumers to

choose some lightweight customizations they can apply atop the service, but the capability delivered is

repeated, religiously.

Pay-per-use. A second core tenet is that the cloud is a shared environment where customers “pay” for the

resources they use only when they use them. Efficiencies come from how much sharing takes place and how

high you can drive the utilization of cloud resources as often as possible. A big reason clouds invoke pay-

per-use costing is to keep the cloud efficient by incenting resource efficiency from the customer themselves.

While many enterprises won’t implement this model the same way public clouds do, they should account for

and either show back or chargeback cloud consumption to maximize the overall cloud investment.

Self-service. For cloud services, self-service doesn’t mean a web page where you request the service. Self-

service is about providing self-service access through a portal to request services that have been defined in a

service catalog. Thus it provides automation that requires minimal IT interaction so that the IT team can

focus on more strategic business needs rather than routine tasks.

The Storage Infrastructure For The Cloud Must Be Standardized And Efficient Nearly every successful cloud is built atop standardized, virtualized server infrastructures tightly integrated with

consistent network and storage architectures that help achieve holistic economic advantage. This means

standardization and automation don’t stop at the server. Storage must be provisioned with each new virtual

machine and shared volumes must be easily integrated into the configuration. Standardization of the storage also

means creating a service catalog of storage services attached to service-level agreements (SLAs) that satisfy the

majority of infrastructure requests from your internal customers, introduce consistency, and streamline the IT

request and delivery process. This is critical to delivering the time-to-market and economic advantages of the

cloud.

This study and other Forrester research show that most IT organizations focus on the server parts of their private

cloud instead of optimizing each component to achieve maximum cost benefits. The storage architecture is

commonly overlooked, leaving lots of efficiencies out of reach. Ideally, cloud storage should handle both latency-

sensitive and latency-insensitive applications at minimal cost, while taking advantage of thin provisioning, life

cycle management, automated tiering, and live migration.

Cost efficiency of storage comes from reducing your total storage requirements; this translates into direct

reductions in expenditures on storage and maintenance costs as well as additional savings on power, cooling, and

floor space. Efficient storage allows you to offer higher SLAs to your internal customers at a lower price. Fifty-six



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percent of cloud users surveyed were planning to stick to the status quo with their storage options — expecting to

have several tiers of service levels for different applications deployed in the cloud. Only 20% were choosing the

cloud best practice of offering single-block and file-shared storage options with a single SLA.

Figure 1

Most Plan To Use High-Cost SAN As Storage Architecture Rather Than Direct- Or Network- Attached Storage

Base: 150 IT infrastructure decision-makers in the US

Source: A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of NetApp, November 2010

To achieve optimum cloud efficiency with your storage architecture, you should consider the following key

capabilities:

Efficient storage is the starting point. Whether a cloud is public or private, the key to success is creating an

appropriate storage infrastructure in which all resources can be efficiently utilized and shared. Because data

storage becomes even more crucial in a shared infrastructure model, efficiency becomes paramount.

Software efficiencies rely on built-in storage virtualization capabilities of advanced storage arrays and

include capabilities such as thin provisioning, deduplication, and file cloning.

Data mobility within a shared resource pool. In a dynamic cloud environment, you need to be able to

move data without interrupting running applications. Seamless data mobility helps you avoid the need for

planned downtime as well as optimize operations by moving virtual storage controllers to balance load or

achieve other objectives.

Standardize storage resources offered through a portal. By standardizing, customers enable their

environment to become more uniform as they add new storage resources and retire aging devices. To make

functions such as self-service efficient and ensure that operations of the cloud are as predictable as possible,

you will want to guide your customers to a defined set of storage service procedures and repeatable

processes that are defined in a service catalog. Creating a catalog of storage services that satisfy the majority

“Which storage architecture do you plan to use for your private cloud?"

2%

0%

10%

7%

10%

2%

22%

46%

9%

1%

4%

5%

6%

10%

25%

40%

Don’t know

Other

Direct-attached storage

iSCSI SAN

Storage-as-a-service (external cloud storage provider)

Fibre Channel over Ethernet SAN

Network-attached storage

Storage-area Network or SAN

Non-user (n=109) Cloud user (n=41)



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of infrastructure requests from your internal customers will provide consistency and streamline the IT

request and delivery process.

Rationalize the prioritization of data in order to ensure efficiency. When data is widely dispersed across

a cloud-based infrastructure, it becomes more difficult to efficiently identify and retrieve “hot” data. Your

customers always think all their data is the most important data in the company. But we know that there are

classes of priority and that the value of data declines with time. Rather than explicitly exposing this to the

customer as options that impede efficiency, solve for this on the back end using automated tiering, tierless

solutions, intelligent caching, or other solutions that automate this process based on use patterns and

relevancy. The method used depends on the type of workload. In some cases, reducing the number of tiers

creates better efficiencies. Whichever method you choose, it’s more efficient than doing it manually. In most

cases, the manual default leads to everything being placed in the highest-performing level of capacity, which

is never the cost-efficient choice.

Secure multitenancy is important to consider for shared storage architecture. Only 14% of survey

respondents felt multitenant security was of critical importance to their private cloud efforts. While private

clouds have fewer security concerns than public clouds, enterprises will need to securely separate business

units and applications from one another and from sub-administrators. For example, you’ll want to ensure

financial applications can safely share your cloud without being accessible to non-financial employees. On

the storage front, this requires a solution that can create multiple, separate virtual storage controllers on a

single system.

Importance Of Storage For Cloud Economics Cloud economics relies upon running a large pool of resources as efficiently as possible. These benefits quickly

decrease as standardization gives way to increasing customization, configuration, and options. Just as consolidating

and virtualizing the server environment is key for running an efficient architecture, the same is true for storage.

Cost efficiency of storage comes from satisfying the majority of infrastructure requests as broadly and consistently

as possible. Ignoring the cloud implications on storage or simply assuming it is the same as traditional storage

keeps efficiencies at bay. Your cloud storage architecture should deliver:

Increased storage utilization. For years IT departments purchased new machines to support new

applications and storage needs despite additional unused space in existing infrastructure. Consolidation,

virtualization, and thin provisioning have begun the process of eliminating this unused space. Your private

cloud environment relies on these concepts of higher utilization to achieve maximum cost reductions.

Reduction in provisioning time. Provisioning storage volumes is a highly repeatable task, and if it requires

time from infrastructure and operations professionals, that represents cost to your cloud, time to deploy, and

time away from higher-value actions that require the brainpower of these administrators. Standardization and

automation are key to cloud economics, and the optimum storage architecture is one that integrates

seamlessly with your cloud automation platform of choice. Storage is a key component of this architecture

and should not be an afterthought, as you may end up having to retrofit your storage to your cloud to achieve

predictable, efficient integration.

Consistent storage management automation. You want to provide different storage services to your cloud

customers, but they shouldn’t come at the cost of consistent management or the ability to easily automate

these functions. This requires a storage system that unifies the key storage functions for both assignment and

protection of data. A single storage automation system that can assign volumes across different storage



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types, migrate data according to life cycle management policies, and centrally back up and take snapshots of

data volumes will allow multiple storage tiers and SLAs to be managed as one. A storage solution that can

adhere to higher-level cloud policies can dramatically improve cloud management efficiencies.



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CONCLUSIONS AND BEST PRACTICES

Design Your Private Cloud As An Integrated, Automated Environment The productivity and economic benefits of cloud computing are too compelling to ignore. You need to start investigating

how to get this right the first time to best leverage it in the years to come. Developers within your company want to take

advantage of these benefits as soon as possible but won’t change their behavior for an inferior experience — you must

meet their time-to-market demands. They will accept compromises in configuration and resource choice to get faster

deployment — public clouds have proven this. Successfully meeting these demands means standardizing, automating,

tightly integrating the infrastructure, and empowering developers through a self-service portal or service catalog. Don’t

waste time trying to bend your existing server virtualization environment into a cloud if you are too far from delivering

these capabilities. Instead, start with an architecture built for the cloud and composed of compatible infrastructure

elements that are cost-optimized and designed to deliver cloud values. Forrester recommends starting with these steps:

Create an integrated enterprise cloud strategy. Gather your IT leaders across the key infrastructure silos

and application development and work together on a common cloud strategy. Start by defining the goals

and expectations and determine which deployment options are optimal for achieving those results — help

reset unrealistic expectations where necessary. Ensure that your network and storage architects are involved

from the beginning so these elements will deliver the efficiencies you are seeking and will integrate

seamlessly with your cloud management platform.

Start with noncritical workloads. Gain credibility with lower-visibility applications or testing and

development where you can set proper expectations for the cloud environment, prove the model for cloud

management, and ensure that your vision for the cloud actually maps to what the business wants from it.

This will also develop your own cloud knowledge before adding higher-profile projects into it.

Baseline the costs and benefits. To persuade developers to share the pool, show them that the tradeoffs

that come with it deliver outsized benefits. Time-to-market will be the most important to them, and if your

cloud can't deliver dramatically faster deployment, then it will be a nonstarter. After you prove the benefits,

the focus will shift to cost: "Is our private cloud really saving us money?" You will have to demonstrate this

with hard numbers. This means comparing the cloud with traditional IT costs in their entirety. Capturing the

capital costs will be easy; utilization and operational efficiency gains, though, will dwarf hard costs, so model

these using Forrester’s relative cost of operations (RCO) methodology.2

Choose enabling technologies that already have service capabilities built in. To optimize a private cloud

solution, IT professionals should reduce the risk of integration and simplify the service architecture by

choosing technologies that come with services built in. Further, since service architectures are likely to have

long service intervals, best practice is to choose capable technologies from companies that have a track

record of working well with other technology venders. The goals of the architecture should include:

o Capability for the infrastructure to share resources between multiple tenants to reduce overhead.

o Capability to deliver multiple policies and SLA commitments from shared infrastructure.

o Tune-ability for tenant workloads internally while also being capable of scaling out.

Secure business unit executive support. The biggest challenge most IT shops face with their private clouds

is getting business units to share the pool. Most developers have historically been spoiled by having their

own hardware and will demand the same from you. Cloud economics don't work if everyone has their own

silo, and you will need a top-down mandate to overcome this culture — something that can be discussed

when creating the enterprise cloud strategy.

Embrace public clouds in a hybrid fashion. Public clouds should be part of your strategy and will enhance

the value and economics of your private cloud investments. Their value is complementary to your private

cloud, as that environment will never be large enough to meet all your company's needs. Scalability testing,



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high-performance computing applications, and highly volatile web applications need on-demand capacity at

times, and building out your private cloud for these peaks is a quick way to destroy the ROI of a private cloud.

So plan to link your private cloud to a public cloud resource for these purposes. Seek out public clouds that

meet the needs of your developers and provide compatibility with your private cloud management platform

and infrastructure elements. Similar storage volumes in both services will make data protection that much

easier.



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Appendix A: Survey Methodology And Demographics

In this study, Forrester conducted an online survey of 150 US enterprise IT decision-makers with an interest in

private clouds in order to highlight misconceptions of private cloud architectures and expectations — particularly

in regard to storage. Survey participants included IT decision-makers in horizontal representation across all

industries and enterprise sizes. Questions provided to the participants asked respondents about their existing

infrastructure and their private cloud experience, plans, and expectations. The study began in early October 2010

and was completed in November 2010.

Figure A1

Respondents From A Variety Of Enterprise Sizes


(percentages may not total 100 because of rounding)


“Approximately how many people work for your company worldwide, including all branches and

locations (not including seasonal or temporary employees)?”

20%

22%

22%

37%

27%

28%

18%

27%

1,000 to 4,999

5,000 to 19,999

20,000 to 49,999

50,000 or more

Cloud users (n = 41) Nonusers (n = 109)



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Figure A2

Respondents From A Variety Of Industries



Appendix B: Supplemental Material And Endnotes

Related Forrester Research “You’re Not Ready For Internal Cloud,” Forrester Research, Inc., July 26, 2010

Endnotes

1 Source: Forrsights Hardware Survey, Q3 2010, Forrester Research, Inc.,

2 Total cost of operations (TCO)-based financial analysis is held up as the gold standard for technology investment

justification, but most firms don't have the rigor to apply the discipline to their environment. To really implement

TCO-based analysis it takes a comprehensive and continuously updated catalog of asset inventory, in-service dates,

agreed-upon operating cost rates for activities, and a scheme to divide shared costs among the constituent business

processes that use them. Source: "TCO Is Overrated," Forrester Research, Inc., August 26, 2008.

14%

3%

6%

4%

11%

11%

13%

18%

20%

Other

Media, entertainment, and leisure

Retail and wholesale trade

Transportation and logistics

Utilities and telecommunications

Public sector (government, etc.)

Business/professional services

Manufacturing

Financial services and insurance

“Which of the following most closely describes your industry?”

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