We are experiencing IT climate change. Inundated we are, daily, with a barrage of “Cloud-ready” solutions that promise to transform, supercharge or in some other way substantial improve your business. Truth is, we’ve all seen this movie before and there is no ending, only a story arch. Technologies come and go and our ability to maximize the return on these solutions is what we makes for a successful adoption. Ask yourself, with all of the promise of the public cloud, how much is hype vs. reality. More details in the presentation.
How to Extend Availability to the Application Layer Across the Hybrid Cloud - VMworld 2019 Presentation
1. How to Extend Availability to
the Application Layer Across
the Hybrid Cloud
Petter Sveum
Sr. Distinguished Engineer, Veritas Technologies
#vmworld #BCA6304BES
SESSION ID
NARRATIVE:
The platform breaks out into three fundamentally important areas in data management: Availability, Protection, and Insight
Availability because we need and expect that our applications are always available, 24/7 business demands so.
We expect data is protected and recoverable no matter where it lives.
And we help customers gain key insights from their data that contribute to operational efficiency, cost optimization, and regulatory readiness.
Despite the incredulity experienced by our friendly neighborhood Spiderman upon learning the existence of multi-verse,, what I am here to tell you today is that there is in fact a multi-cloud. One that is readily available and with any luck won’t cause tear in the fabric of your IT reality. All kidding aside, why are we hear today?
There is no standard definition for what the “Cloud” means. When considering the all possibilities, adopters seek to address a myriad of use cases, ranging from the tactical and operational goals to the enterprise & strategic economic effects.
PaaS vs. SaaS vs IaaS
Cloud as a DR Target?
Cloud Bursting?
Supplemental Platform (Dev/Test)?
Primary Platform?
Archive, Cold or Nearline Storage?
Time Estimate: 1 Minutes
Planned Questions: How often do you bring up performance when having a conversations regarding availability and/or resiliency.?
Goal of Slide: To articulate the full spectrum of availability that Veritas is keen on addressing as well as to showcase that Veritas (with InfoScale) can resolve both simultaneously.
Delivery
Lets begin by defining what availability means. From a dictionary perspective, it actually carries two definitions., the first being ready for use while the alternate is having enough power or efficacy What this means from technology perspective is whether a service is running or whether a service is performing. An easy comparison would be that of a light switch versus a dimmer switch. This is an important distinction between not only the different Veritas technologies but our competition, as they typically only address the light switch perspective. In the context of business outcomes and tier 1 applications, an underperforming app is in many cases more detrimental than one that is simply offline (from a troubleshooting perspective). Just recently movie theater websites globally were overwhelmed due to the massive demand for Avengers pre-sale tickets. The sites were up, but they we not responsive and resulted in hours of being inline, online. What’s important for us to convey however is that with InfoScale, we address both simultaneously.
Availability is not simply a yes/no or off/conversation
You can easily convey this sentiment with the comparison of a light switch versus a dimmer switch.
Modern Data Center will benefit from technologies that can address all manner of availability risks
Prevailing wisdom is that Brown-outs are inevitably more difficult to remediate than blackouts.
a·vail·a·ble
[uh-vey-luh-buhl]
Adjective
1. suitable or ready for use; of use or service; at hand: I used whatever tools were available.
2. readily obtainable; accessible: available resources.
3. having sufficient power or efficacy; valid.
4. Archaic. efficacious; profitable; advantageous.
Cloud as a DR Target?
Cloud Bursting?
Supplemental Platform (Dev/Test)?
Primary Platform?
Archive, Cold or Nearline Storage?
P Physical
V Virtual
H Hyperconverged
C Cloud
There are some basic functional areas that are necessary to ensure proper application performance, portability and resiliency when cloud bursting.
<CLICK> These include first a storage agnostic and equally as important, bandwidth efficient replication solution.
<CLICK> Once you’ve seeded your data in the Cloud, you’ll need the ability to scale performance without sacrificing availability (this is of course without the luxury of shared storage)
<CLICK> After which, you’ll need to provide granular, application-level visibility to your services.
<CLICK> Finally, we must provide an orchestration layer that ensures all the necessary services are easily transitioned off-site into the public cloud.
With these ideas in mind, lets explore how InfoScale delvers on these necessary functions.
Applications which were working on-prem would continue to work as it is with Infoscale abstracting cloud and other H/W aspects.
Applications can work as it is without a change on cloud.
We are experiencing IT climate change. Inundated we are, daily, with a barrage of “Cloud-ready” solutions that promise to transform, supercharge or in some other way substantial improve your business. Truth is, we’ve all seen this movie before and there is no ending, only a story arch. Technologies come and go and our ability to maximize the return on these solutions is what we makes for a successful adoption. Ask yourself, with all of the promise of the public cloud, how much is hype vs. reality.
InfoScale’s caching solution - SmartIO – allows you to exploit the SSD based instance store – An instance store provides temporary block-level storage for your instance. This storage is located on disks that are physically attached to the host computer. SmartIO is InfoScale’s application aware intelligent caching solution. Exploiting this fast access storage to accelerate your applications and deliver high performant OLTP and OLAP applications. SmartIO allows caching to be setup in three configurations
Volume/Block based read caching – useful with applications that can work with “RAW” storage
File based read caching – provides file level granularity for read caching and is intelligent to determine which bits of data are more important than other
File based write-back caching - provides file level granularity for read and write caching. Primary node’s cached data can me mirrored to another secondary node for protection against primary node going down
SmartIO provides application integration that allows you to pin specific application data to pre warm the cache in a file based caching setup and guarantee level of performance for your mission critical applications. SamrtIO also allows you to carve out a specific amount of cache to be reserves for specific applications.
AWS provides IaaS. You get compute (EC2), networking (10Ge interconnects), and storage (SSD / HDD based EBS and SSD based instance store. This infrastructure is not enough to run your enterprise applications. There are missing pieces. You do not have shared storage. Without shared storage, you cannot horizontally scale out enterprise applications. The infrastructure that AWS provides needs to be pooled together to allow elasticity of application workloads.
<Click> InfoScale consumes AWS infrastructure and presents it as a cluster of poled resources.
<Click> This infrastructure can then run parallel applications in a active / active mode – providing the highest level of availability. This is possible again, because InfoScale can consume the EBS storage and create a shared pool.
<Click> If applications need more compute resources, then compute only resources can be dynamically added to the cluster
<Click> If applications need more storage resources, then storage only resources can be dynamically added to the cluster
Compute and storage can scale independently providing maximum flexibility of infrastructure.
<Click> You can run multiple applications on the shared infrastructure which allows for maximum utilization of AWS infrastructure – thereby reducing AWS infrastructure costs.
<Click> You can setup SLAs that guarantees levels of service for applications that run on the shared cluster infrastructure.
Provision standard Cloud Instances
InfoScale on Cloud Instance creates shared storage infrastructure
Run parallel application using shared storage in an Active-Active Setup
Scale compute with compute only nodes
Scale storage independent of compute
Run multiple applications in a shared infrastructure
The path however to effective cloud bursting must first begin with the ability to replicate data, efficiently and cost effectively, to and from ( as well as within) the public cloud. With InfoScale, Volume and File Replicator offer multiple options for ensuring data consistency and resiliency between both on-prem and public cloud resources (Addressing both RPO and RTO concerns). Moreover, with Volume Replicator, you are only transferring the bits consumed by your application and therefore after the initial sync only the delta changes are replicated., (a feature referred to as SmartMove) What this means is that for a 1 TB file system if only using 250 GB, VVR will ignore the 750 GB of whitespace thus reducing network load and overhead. It is also important to note that, VVR by design is both a round-trip ticket as well as storage agnostic. This means applications can be replicated to the cloud at will without concern for the destination storage type. Even migrating from physical UNIX to Linunx in the cloud is supported and wizard drive (which we will demonstrate later in the session). VVR also provides the necessary egress to extract your data from the public cloud to either bring back on-prem or transfer to another cloud provider.
Now that we have addressed the manner in which your application data can be replicated to the public cloud, what then becomes of the applications themselves? One of the most compelling features supported in side of InfoScale is a capability entitled Virtual Business Services. Simply put, VBS is a logical grouping of applications working in concert to support your enterprise. It s not enough to focus on individual applications as you are often left with a “weakest link” scenario (Only some of my tiers have the same RPO/RTO). What’s more, most business services are heterogeneous and therefore are not natively visible across disparate Operating Systems be they physical or virtual. At the risk of sounding to much like a marketing pitch, VBS also enables the single click recovery of the aforementioned services by automating not just the start and stop sequence but the data replication and DR failover. Imagine for a moment that you have multiple applications with varying levels of dependency, not much of stretch in my experience. Cloud bursting, while seemingly valuable , seems ever so elusive due largely in part to your lack of visibility and orchestration capabilities across the various application tiers. In your environments. With a single click Recovery Plan, VBS can automate the promotion of whichever critical service you are wishing to establish in the cloud. The result, a simplified and efficient means of transitioning entire workloads to the public cloud with confidence.
This is the focus for InfoScale.
Storage Reliability and Performance
SmartIO: Accelerate applications using SSD caching
Data mirroring: in cluster setup; Replication: between AZ, Region, Clouds, On-prem & Cloud; Snapshots
Storage services: Compression, Encryption, Tiering, etc.
No need of provisioned IOPS - SmartIO using SSD Instance Storage + Magnetic EBS
Scaling Applications on Cloud
FSS allows enterprise applications to scale and provides flexibility
Flexible Storage Sharing – Direct attached Storage, Hybrid
Cluster File System – Shared Storage
Enterprise applications need shared storage to scale
Performance at scale with FSS; Add storage/compute nodes vs adding application nodes
Snapshots – Spaced optimized, Instant
Higher availability that EBS volumes. Protect against EBS volume failure.
Highly Available Enterprise Applications
Solutions on Cloud need to deliver stack wide HA or DR solutions
Integrated Storage and Availability solution delivers application aware HA and DR
Both Active-Active and Active-Passive configurations are enabled
Cloud Only & Hybrid Cloud Deployments
Replication: between AZ, Region, Clouds, On-prem & Cloud
Extend Cloud as a DR and storage tier
Move multi-tired application across Regions or Hybrid Cloud
Cloud burst applications from private DC to public Cloud
As most of you are probably already aware, our flagship storage and availability solution (Storage Foundation) has been rebranded InfoScale. To that end, you are now afforded a much more simplified entitlement and packaging model which combines all of our most commonly used functions into essentially 3 flavors (Availability, Storage and Enterprise). Wasn’t’ hasn’t changed however is that we continue to support all industry leading Operating systems and Hypervisors with the added benefit of Cloud platforms now as well. Our storage management layer extends beyond SAN storage to include local flash, ssd and DAS with the recent inclusion of cloud S3 targets. From an availability perspective we have enhanced our agent framework to include new networking agents to account for VPC configurations as well as certified our replication solutions to support on-prem to cloud recovery. What is also a newly introduced function is the ability to automate the migration of your workload across OS platforms into the public cloud using our VIOM application migration wizard. Simply put, InfoScale represent s software defined infrastructure solution for the hybrid and multi-cloud data center.
Time Estimate: 2-3 Minutes
Planned Questions: Ask yourself which of these areas are your customers most concerned with. Take a moment and think about whether you have positioned InfoScale or VRP to address these?
Goal of the Slide: Attendees should understand the 3 key tenets of InfoScale. That value we bring to customers is not a catalog of features, but rather how well we can deliver on these expectations. Remembering, it’s a full-spectrum approach, as both the dimmer switch and the light switch.
Delivery: Start by acknowledging that InfoScale has more features than we can begin to describe.
Winning in our customers environments is not a factor of which feature as much as it is which use case.
Take this opportunity to highlight how these 3 key areas are very much rooted in the successful achievement of our customers business goals.
Performance = More Revenue, Happier Customers and Room to Growth
Eliminating Down = Reducing Risk, Improving Reputation and Gaining confidence
Agility = Being prepared for the next curve in the road, being ready when the next technology innovation is upon us.
Emphasize hybrid could capability
Since it’s inception, InfoScale has been providing a multitude of HA/DR topology options. Each providing a unique value depending on a number of factors, most commonly being your preferred method of replication, recovery time and/or recovery point objectives.
<CLICK> The basic local HA architecture continues to support a multitude of mission-critical workloads, with having now been adapted for use in the public cloud.
<CLICK> The stretched/metro or replicated data cluster model has grown in popularity over the years as It affords users a combination of HA and DR without have to re-architect any of your applications or services. Stricter RPO and RTO expectations also have given rise to a greater number of these cluster types. <Click> The public cloud is no exception as providing resiliency between Availability Zones is an important consideration.
<CLICK> The standard 2-Site DR configuration represents our most commonly deployed geographically dispersed model, <CLICK> allowing for application recovery across an unlimited distance.
<Click> It is important to understand that it is in this model we are provided with the ancillary benefit of opting for the Cloud Bursting use-case as opposed to only a DR target
This is the focus for InfoScale.
Storage Reliability and Performance
SmartIO: Accelerate applications using SSD caching
Data mirroring: in cluster setup; Replication: between AZ, Region, Clouds, On-prem & Cloud; Snapshots
Storage services: Compression, Encryption, Tiering, etc.
No need of provisioned IOPS - SmartIO using SSD Instance Storage + Magnetic EBS
Scaling Applications on Cloud
FSS allows enterprise applications to scale and provides flexibility
Flexible Storage Sharing – Direct attached Storage, Hybrid
Cluster File System – Shared Storage
Enterprise applications need shared storage to scale
Performance at scale with FSS; Add storage/compute nodes vs adding application nodes
Snapshots – Spaced optimized, Instant
Higher availability that EBS volumes. Protect against EBS volume failure.
Highly Available Enterprise Applications
Solutions on Cloud need to deliver stack wide HA or DR solutions
Integrated Storage and Availability solution delivers application aware HA and DR
Both Active-Active and Active-Passive configurations are enabled
Cloud Only & Hybrid Cloud Deployments
Replication: between AZ, Region, Clouds, On-prem & Cloud
Extend Cloud as a DR and storage tier
Move multi-tired application across Regions or Hybrid Cloud
Cloud burst applications from private DC to public Cloud
With NetBackup and VRP you get highly automated, unified approach to business continuity. You no longer need multiple point tools for your different RTO, and RPO needs.
With NetBackup and VRP you can:
Do non-disruptive NetBackup recovery rehearsals
Do single click NetBackup restores and application recovery or site failovers
Eliminate business service blind spots such as upstream and downstream workload dependencies
Do bulk restores of hundreds of VM’s using a single procedure
Increases confidence of RPO & RTO and prove audit compliance with rehearsals and built-in reporting
Limitation of current integration in between NBU and VRP
Vmware to Vmware using NBU Air only
No option for customer to use VRP data mover or choice of RPO based on criticality of workload