This IDG interview article features EMC ViPR Data Services CTO, Mark O'Connell as he discusses the ever-changing storage landscape, rise of object, and EMC's strategic direction with Software-Defined Storage.

1. EXECUTIVE
A D V E R T O R I A L
VIEWPOINT
Why enterprises need
to move to a new
storage paradigm
Mark O’Connell
VIPR DATA SERVICES CTO,
ADVANCED SOFTWARE DIVISION,
EMC CORPORATION
Mark O’Connell is the ViPR
Data Services CTO within the
Advanced Software Division
at EMC Corporation. With
more than 37,000 employees
worldwide, EMC is the world
leader in products, services,
and solutions for information
management. Among the
products Mark covers is ViPR,
a software-defined storage
platform with support for
heterogeneous storage and
APIs, EMC Atmos, the industry’s leading multi-petabyte
information management
solution, and EMC Centera, the
industry’s leading compliance
and archiving offering.
LEARN MORE ABOUT VIPR:
www.emc.com/vipr
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https://twitter.com/EMCITMgmt
* Source: Big Data Study, CIO, July 2012
Traditional block and file storage cannot scale to today’s volume of data or the
increased demand for access to it via the
Internet or mobile devices. A CIO survey
of IT leaders about Big Data shows that on
average, respondents expect the amount
of data they are managing to nearly double
within the next year to 18 months, from 193
terabytes to 285 terabytes.* Meanwhile, given the ubiquity of smart phones and tablets,
it’s no surprise that an InfoWorld survey,
Navigating IT: Objectives and Obstacles,
shows that more than one-third of organizations are investing or increasing investments in mobile application development.
Mark O’Connell, ViPR Data Services
CTO for EMC’s Advanced Software Division, discusses how IT leaders can meet
challenges with object-based storage – and
at the same time leverage the technology
to many advantageous ends, including becoming a more strategic consulting partner
to the business.
What key trends are causing the enterprise to rethink storage, increasingly in
favor of object storage?
The industry is moving to a different storage paradigm for two main reasons: the
sheer scale of digital information today,
plus the increasing demand for access to
that information online – often and from
anywhere. That greater scale of information and changes in how users are accessing
it doesn’t fit the traditional paradigms of
file system or block storage.
Object storage gives you a greater degree
of scalability without the management
overhead that traditional block and file systems require. You can see an early example in EMC Centera. It was one of the first
true object storage platforms, combining
multiple disk drives and presenting as one
single object store that could be up to even a
hundred terabytes, all easily accessible and
manageable via an application that didn’t
have to worry about space management or
any of those elements.
Object storage today also satisfies
breadth of access with new protocols that
are Internet-friendly, and mobile devicefriendly. Proprietary APIs in early devices
have given way to accessing data in object
stores over the Internet via simple REST
protocols.
What are some of the most important
evolutions in object storage positively
impacting IT operations?
One is that companies like Amazon with
S3, Microsoft with Azure, and EMC with
Atmos, came out with REST-based access
to large, scalable object storage in the cloud
that allowed full updates to the information and greater multi-tenancy. So you
could segment large, scalable object stores
into separate administrative domains such
that individual customers can access and
have management privileges for just their
data. That means you could use more of a
service provider model internally in the
enterprise, or externally as Amazon and
the others do. And with the multi-tenancy
capabilities, not only is it very easy for end
users to request storage and get it immediately, but also for IT to enforce a consistent
set of standards for how that storage is used.
Another is that in traditional file system and block-based devices, once data
is placed in a location, it’s hard or risky to
move it. So IT personnel spend a lot of time
matching storage characteristics to applications and carefully planning migrations.
With object storage, what’s changing over
time is that a lot of those concerns are taken
on by the storage environment itself.
An example: With EMC’s new ViPR
software-defined storage platform, which
supports Amazon S3 and EMC Atmos
REST-based APIs, when an application
needs data, it simply requests a new bucket
of storage, and provisions that storage immediately. The storage array underneath
can figure out where that data should be located; if the application has different needs
over time, the storage array can be made
aware of that via a policy change for that
data. Object storage can automatically and
seamlessly move data around independent
of and transparent to the application.
When IT doesn’t have to worry about
routine provisioning tasks or data mobility,
they can focus more on longer-term data
center needs. They can think about the application growth, mobility and access requirements, whether there should be one
copy of the data in a distributed fashion or
multiple copies for speed of access. That
makes IT a higher-value service, and more
of a consultant with application developers
and application administrators about how
best to deploy an application and how best
to satisfy end users
What cost savings should emerge from
the move to object storage?
Greater automation of routine IT tasks leads
to cost-savings. You don’t need as many IT
people to manage a much larger-scale object
storage system. There’s also cost savings in
that there’s a greater flexibility regarding
geographic locations of data and how it can
move there, and much lower management
associated with that. In a traditional block
and file world, when a network connection
breaks you have to resynchronize the entire data set. With object storage, you just
resynchronize the changes that occurred
since the outage.
Additionally, object storage drives are
cheaper on a dollar-per-gigabyte basis. You
pay about the same amount for a very fast
enterprise-class drive in a block or file system as for a drive in an object storage system.
But object storage systems can use much
larger drives, and hold 10 to 15 times as
much data. And by scaling out the number
of processing heads that are available with
object storage, you can scale performance
pretty much to any level you need to within
the context of that object storage system.
How can you assure that existing storage
investments and data are protected as
object storage comes online – and that
future investments in object storage are
sound ones, too?
We can’t forget that people do have large
infrastructures in place with applications
and storage that isn’t going away. So IT
shops and the business overall should use
a partner who can work across generational
changes – who can help it maintain its existing footprint while helping customers
transition to the new world. That partner
should help them understand which workloads are appropriate to move to an object
storage environment and which to leave
in their existing locations because there
is not a cost benefit to moving and reworking them.
Moving forward with object storage,
enterprise need to drive toward standard
technology - REST–based systems and S3
interfaces, for example. So whatever implementation a customer has today, it won’t be
tied to that, but will have a choice among
different providers that have all coded to
those standard interfaces.
How does object storage add up to a
benefit for the business?
For one thing, application developers
will be able to focus on the core business
needs of an application because they won’t
have to take on storage management. In an
object storage platform, those concerns are
automated and internalized inside the system, so the developer can focus purely on
how to lay out data and organize it in a way
to make sense for the business needs of an
application, vs. matching that to the underlying storage system and some of its quirks.
It’s also going to be easier to have analytics capabilities built into the object storage platform. So, developers also can look
at how to structure application data not
only to respond to the business needs now,
but to drive additional benefits out of that
same data.
When IT doesn’t
have to worry
about routine provisioning tasks or
data mobility, they
can focus more on
longer-term data
center needs.