CLOUD STORAGE FOR CLOUD COMPUING [3]

 

 Figure 3: The OCCI Lifecycle Model

With OCCI, cloud computing clients can invoke a new application stack, manage its lifecycle and manage the resources that it uses. The OCCI interface can also be used to assign storage to a virtual machine in order to run the application stack such as that exported by SNIA’s CDMI interface. Next we will examine the means of managing that storage and the data in it.

Cloud Storage Overview

Just like Cloud Computing, Cloud Storage has also been increasing in popularity recently due to many of the same reasons as Cloud Computing. Cloud Storage delivers virtualized storage on demand, over a network based on a request for a given quality of service (QoS). There is no need to purchase storage or in some cases even provision it before storing data. You only pay for the amount of storage your data is actually consuming.

Some of the Use Cases

Cloud storage is used in many different ways. For example: local data (such as on a laptop) can be backed up to cloud storage; a virtual disk can be “synched” to the cloud and distributed to other computers; and the cloud can be used as an archive to retain (under policy) data for regulatory or other purposes.

Web facing applications

For applications that provide data directly to their clients via the network, cloud storage can be used to store that data and the client can be redirected to a location at the cloud storage provider for the data. Media such as audio and video files are an example of this, and the network requirements for streaming data files can be made to scale in order to meet the demand without affecting the application.

The type of interface used for this is just HTTP. Fetching the file can be done from a browser without having to do any special coding, and the correct application is invoked automatically. But how do you get the file there in the first place and how do you make sure the storage you use is of the right type

and QoS? Again many offerings expose an interface for these operations, and it’s not surprising that many of these interfaces use REST principals as well. This is typically a data object interface with operations for creating, reading, updating and deleting the individual data objects via HTTP operations.

For cloud computing boot images, cloud storage is almost always offered via traditional block and file interfaces such as iSCSI or NFS. These are then

mounted by the virtual machine and attached to a guest for use by cloud computing. Additional drives and filesystems can be similarly provisioned. Of course cloud computing applications can use the data object interface as well, once they are running.

What makes Cloud Storage different?

The difference between the purchase of a dedicated appliance and that of cloud storage is not the functional interface, but merely the fact that the storage is delivered on demand. The customer pays for either what they actually use or in other

cases, what they have allocated for use. In the case of block storage, a LUN or virtual volume is the granularity of allocation. For file protocols, a filesystem is the unit of granularity. In either case, the actual storage space can be thin provisioned and billed for based on actual usage. Data services such as compression and deduplication can be used to further reduce the actual space consumed.

The management of this storage is typically done out of band of these standard Data Storage interfaces, either through an API, or more commonly, though an administrative browser based user interface. This interface may be used to invoke other data services as well, such as snapshot and cloning.

Introducing CDMI

The Storage Networking Industry Association™ has created a technical work group to address the need for a cloud storage standard. The new Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) is meant to enable interoperable cloud storage and data management. In CDMI, the underlying storage space exposed by the above interfaces is abstracted using the notion of a container. A container is not only a useful abstraction for storage space, but also serves as a grouping of the data stored in it, and a point of control for applying data services in the aggregate.