With data overflows and escalated storage costs, organizations, today, are challenged with identifying and optimizing storage consumption within their business units (BUs). This calls for scalable cloud-based storage models that can provision storage space on-demand with no disruption and host multiple BUs securely.
Data storage demand forecasts for an organization are often inflated, leading to sub-optimal allocation of space to BUs. Shared public cloud storage, while delivering the needed flexibility across BUs, may compromise the data security that is critical to the business.
Here, we provide a reference architecture to implement private cloud storage in a storage-as-a-service (St-aaS) model in an enterprise environment. Built around a common storage resource pool, the architecture supports automated provisioning of virtualized storage to BUs through a self-service catalog. It also provides a mechanism to implement a pay-per-use consumer style file sharing service without compromising on data security.
Private Cloud Storage: Key Characteristics
- Apart from automated provisioning, private cloud storage offers enterprise BUs on-demand and scalable access to a shared resource pool through a simplified management platform.
- It can not only scale vertically to meet additional storage requirements, but also horizontally, allowing non-disruptive introduction of additional storage controller nodes under the same namespace.
- The private cloud supports secure sharing of the storage resources among multiple storage tenants (such as BUs). This delivers high storage utilization and cost-effective implementation.
- Finally, it supports storage utilization metering and chargeback based on usage, with different models for block-based Storage Area Network (SAN) environment for applications and file-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) environments.
Reference Architecture for Storage-as-a-Service (St-aaS)
Private cloud storage is an infrastructure prerequisite to deliver a truly automated St-aaS model. The reference architecture for St-aaS should be based on the storage attributes and requirements most important to an organization.
We present three architecture models:
- A standardized service framework to implement St-aaS encompassing virtualized storage infrastructure, data provisioning and protection strategies
- The SAN-based reference architecture that addresses the block storage requirements of applications
- The NAS-based reference architecture that provides the solution for file storage and sharing and mobility requirements of the end-users
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