A Guide to Accelerating the Pace of Innovation with Affordable, Agile and Scalable Storage.
A Guide to Accelerating the Pace of Innovation with Affordable, Agile and Scalable Storage.
Today’s fractured software development and deployment practices are too inefficient and slow for the fast-paced digital world. In most businesses, software development and IT operations are carried out by separate teams with different motivations and mindsets, using different toolsets and methodologies.
Development teams are responsible for building and testing software, and are usually tied to individual business units. Operations teams are responsible for managing IT infrastructure and production applications, and are typically part of a central IT organization.
Each team uses distinct tools and methods, which creates inefficiencies, limits collaboration and impairs business agility. And to make matters worse, development and operations teams typically have different (and often conflicting) goals and cultures, which often leads to tension, delays and shadow IT projects that bypass the inherent overhead and red tape of these conflicts.
Across the globe, businesses of every size and industry are turning to DevOps—fusing software development, integration, test and operations methods and practices—to reduce these inefficiencies and make it possible to tie tech innovation to business goals in a radically accelerated way. A RightScale survey of over 1000 IT professionals reveals 70% of SMBs and 81% of enterprises are adopting DevOps practices.
DevOps is a collection of philosophies, methodologies and toolsets that help businesses deliver applications more quickly and cost-effectively. DevOps leverages agile and lean software development principles and practices to improve collaboration and productivity across engineering, quality assurance and operations teams.
By eliminating independent functional and administrative silos, and automating change management, configuration management and deployment processes, DevOps helps companies accelerate time-to-market, improve software quality and reduce costs. The latest continuous development, integration and delivery methodologies allow software developers to incorporate user feedback quickly and efficiently, enabling businesses to be more flexible and responsive to customer needs.
A methodology, a set of practices, and a set of enabling technologies that unify a highly collaborative team consisting of business leadership, design, development, testing, process and portfolio management, deployment, and operations to be responsible for the creation and delivery of business capabilities.
Traditional enterprise data centers aren’t well suited for DevOps. Many enterprises still rely on legacy on-premises IT implementations composed of independent compute, storage and networking platforms. These siloed, CAPEX-intensive environments are inherently costly and complex to deploy, operate and scale.
With a conventional enterprise data center, compute, storage and networking resources are all over-engineered to meet future capacity requirements and peak traffic demands—an expensive and wasteful approach. Excessive capital equipment costs and high ongoing operations expenses lead to expensive business models with long paybacks.
Worse still, legacy IT implementations are notoriously difficult to automate. Each technology platform supports a unique administrative interface and proprietary (often cryptic) API. Most IT organizations rely on crude and fragile scripts for automation. Adding capacity and turning up IT services can be a manually intensive, time-consuming proposition involving a number of different IT specialists. It can take days or even weeks for IT to stand up infrastructure to support new projects. In short, traditional IT operational processes have become a barrier to innovation.
DevOps requires far more agile, scalable and cost-effective IT infrastructure that are built for an on-demand, much faster pace. Many businesses are turning to cloud compute, storage and networking solutions to power DevOps initiatives. Cloud services are instantly and infinitely scalable, easily programmable and more cost-effective to deploy and operate, making them ideal for DevOps.
OSS hot cloud storage is extremely affordable, fast and reliable cloud object storage for any purpose. Specifically conceived to make storage a commonplace utility like electricity, OSS is easy to understand, easy to automate and exceptionally cost-effective to scale, making it perfect for DevOps.
OSS offers many functional and financial advantages over traditional on-premises storage solutions (DAS/NAS/SAN/HCI) typically used in private clouds, as well as first-generation public cloud storage solutions from AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. OSS works with popular IT automation and configuration management tools like Ansible for easy integration with DevOps and CI/CD flows and practices.
OSS can help you reduce TCO and accelerate time-to-value and IT service agility by eliminating storage equipment expense and complexity, increasing automation and enabling pay-as-you-grow scalability.
Advantages of using OSS hot cloud storage compared to traditional on-site storage solutions include:
Better economics
OSS eliminates upfront capital equipment investments, recurring hardware maintenance fees and ongoing equipment operations expenses (power, cooling, real estate).
Instant and infinite scalability
with OSS you can expand capacity on-demand to satisfy real-time application requirements and tightly align ongoing expenses with evolving business demands.
Easily programmable infrastructure
OSS supports the AWS S3 API, which has emerged as a de facto standard. With OSS, developers and test engineers can provision storage capacity in real-time, without IT intervention, using popular configuration management tools like Ansible well as with self-serve service orchestration solutions.
Simplified IT operations
With no storage infrastructure to manage, you can free up valuable (and expensive) IT operations staff to focus on strategic tasks to support and grow the business.
Future-proof investment
With OSS new features and capabilities are introduced in the cloud, without disruption.
Improved data durability
OSS provides eleven nines (99.999999999%) of object durability—better than most on-premises storage platforms.
OSS hot cloud storage is less expensive, faster performing and easier to procure and budget than first-generation storage services from AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Unlike with legacy cloud storage services, with OSS there are no confusing storage tiers to decipher and no complicated fee structures to decode. One product, with straightforward and ultra-low pricing, supports a wide range of applications.
Commodity pricing
OSS hot cloud storage costs a flat $.0059/GB/month. Compare that to $.023/GB/month for Amazon S3 Standard, $.026/GB/month for Google Multi-Regional and $.046/GB/month for Azure RA-GRS Hot.
Unlike AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Azure we don’t impose extra fees to retrieve data from storage (egress fees). And we don’t charge extra fees for PUT, GET, DELETE or other API calls. Read our New Economics of Cloud Storage tech brief for additional information. Advantages of using OSS hot cloud storage compared to first-generation cloud storage solutions include:
Superior performance
OSS parallelized system architecture delivers a faster read/write performance advantage over first-generation cloud-storage services, with significantly faster time-to-first-byte speeds.
Download our Performance Benchmark report for additional information.
Easily programmable infrastructure
OSS supports the AWS S3 API, which has emerged as a de facto standard. With OSS, developers and test engineers can provision storage capacity in real-time, without IT intervention, using popular configuration management tools like Ansible well as with self-serve service orchestration solutions.
Robust data durability and protection
OSS hot cloud storage is engineered to deliver extreme data durability, integrity and security. An optional data immutability capability prevents accidental deletions and administrative mishaps; protects against malware, bugs and viruses; and improves regulatory compliance.
Read our Strong Security and Data Immutability tech briefs for additional information.
First-generation cloud storage providers offer confusing tiered storage services. Each storage tier is intended for a specific type of data, and has distinct performance characteristics, SLAs and pricing plans (with complex fee structures).
While each vendor’s portfolio is slightly different, these tiered services are generally optimized for three distinct classes of data.
Active data
Live data that is readily accessible by the operating system, an application or users. Active data is frequently accessed and has stringent read/write performance requirements.
Active Archive
Occasionally accessed data that is available instantly online (not restored and rehydrated from an offline or remote source). Examples include backup data for rapid disaster recovery or large video files that might be accessed from time-to-time on short notice.
Inactive Archive
Infrequently accessed data. Examples include data maintained long-term for regulatory compliance. Historically, inactive data is archived to tape and stored offsite.
Identifying the best storage class (and best value) for a particular application can be a real challenge with a legacy cloud storage provider. Microsoft Azure, for example, offers four distinct object storage options: General Purpose v1, General Purpose v2, Blob Storage and Premium Blob Storage. Each option has unique pricing and performance characteristics. And some (but not all) of the options support three distinct storage tiers, with distinct SLAs and fees: hot storage (for frequently accessed data), cool storage (for infrequently accessed data) and archive storage (for rarely accessed data). With so many choices and pricing variables, it is nearly impossible to make a well-informed decision and to accurately budget expenses.
At OSS, we believe cloud storage should be simple. Unlike legacy cloud storage services with confusing storage tiers and convoluted pricing schemes, we provide a single product—with predictable, affordable and straightforward pricing—that satisfies any cloud storage requirement. You can use OSS for any data storage class: active data, active archive and inactive archive.
You can use OSS as fast and affordable primary storage throughout the DevOps lifecycle—for development, test and production environments.
You can develop, test and run applications on your preferred compute cloud(s) and store your data on OSS. A multi-cloud approach helps you avoid lock-in and improve choice. Development and operations teams can use the compute clouds that best meet their specific functional requirements and budget constraints.
OSS supports direct private or public network connectivity to AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Packet and other popular IaaS and PaaS platforms through partnerships with leading colocation, carrier hotel and exchange providers like Equinix, Flexential and Limelight Networks. These private network connections avoid internet latency and bottlenecks, providing fast and predictable performance. You can also connect your private cloud directly to OSS. Unlike with legacy public cloud providers, OSS has no charges for egress or API requests.
Testing real-world scenarios is a significant challenge for many development organizations. When rolling out new software releases QA and staging teams need to thoroughly validate application performance, scalability and resiliency under real-world conditions. But most development organizations lack the storage capacity and human resources required to stage and test production workloads. Instead, most organizations rely on synthetic test data to simulate real-world environments. Often outdated and incomplete, synthetic data is rarely an adequate substitute for real-world production data.
OSS hot cloud storage can help you overcome these challenges. OSS is a fraction of the price of alternative storage solutions, and is instantly and infinitely scalable. Development teams can load a copy of live production data onto OSS for staging and testing—quickly, easily and cost-effectively.
OSS integrates with leading DevOps data management solutions like Actifio (see Actifio+OSS Partner Page, and Actifio DevOps page) that let development and test teams efficiently access live production datasets without impairing the performance of production applications. Real-world testing dramatically improves software quality and customer satisfaction.
You can use OSS for rapid data backup and recovery for development, test and production environments. OSS integrates with a wide range of commercial and open-source S3-compliant data management solutions.
You can use OSS to protect data and content stored on
Development and test engineering servers, desktops and laptops Unlike with disk or tape-based data protection schemes, with OSS, backup data is instantly accessible. And OSS highly parallelized system architecture accelerates read/write operations for rapid backup and restoration.
If you are using AWS S3 for primary storage, you can use OSS as a cost-effective hot standby platform. OSS hot cloud storage is an affordable alternative to AWS S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR). You can keep a live copy of your S3 data on OSS for a fraction of the price of a secondary S3 region. If the S3 service is unavailable your applications can failover to OSS.
Whether you are just embarking on your DevOps journey or looking to improve the performance of an existing DevOps environment, OSS can help you reduce storage expense and complexity, and accelerate IT service agility. Fast, programmable and exceptionally cost-effective to scale, OSS is the ideal DevOps cloud storage solution.
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