A piece of cloud for business

    When we pay for gas, water, gas, do we wonder where all these benefits come from? Not. And this is natural. It is important for us that the light comes, but where it comes from is not interesting for us, we need a resource.

    The concept of cloud computing has a similar scheme, it consists in looking at IT from the side of the business, getting the most transparency of IT resources, and abstracting from the perception of IT as "heaps of heating and dusting iron." The same habramoment came when it is necessary to mention the fundamental features of technology - abstraction. When we abstract from a specific server model, from specific hardware in its configuration, we get the freedom to work on any equipment (of course, remember that we won’t get rid of the type of processor architecture).

    But abstracting from a specific storage system or virtualizing it is no longer a trivial task. This problem can be solved in different ways:
    1) Purchase of a new data storage system and disk space of the required volume.
    2) Upgrade existing storage systems to a unified virtual platform.

    This is where NetApp is worth mentioning. Firstly, all NetApp systems solve the virtualization problem of storage systems - after all, we get a logical volume on top of the N-number of hard drives. In fact, we don’t know which disk the bit is on - this is not important to us. The important thing is that we can stretch this volume depending on our tasks, scale it in any direction - it will still remain for us 1 logical substance with which we will work. Such a solution will easily satisfy the solution of the first problem. But what to do with the second? ..

    To solve the second problem, we can use V-Series products - this will allow us to use existing storage systems regardless of their manufacturer and complement their functionality with virtualization of the array itself - we will get the same 1 logical volume. In some cases, they specially take disk shelves from a particular vendor and supplement them with V-Series controllers from above - as a result, we can get some synergistic effect: high performance of disk shelves, multiplied by NetApp capabilities, and not only storage virtualization, but also features the creation of Snapshot and SnapClone, as well as many other goodies ...

    For "cloud" solutions, the "rubberiness" of all system entities, including the data storage system, is very important. In this regard, solutions from NetApp have a very big plus when choosing a storage system for the cloud, not to mention the many plug-ins and huge support for cloud platforms such as Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware ESX / ESXi.

    Tip-summary of the day: when designing "cloud" solutions, pay special attention to disk virtualization - consider systems with "native" virtualization support, which are ground in nature under the "clouds" - and NetApp solutions are an excellent choice.

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