Cloud Forecast: Where It’s Been and Where It’s Heading
Arguably the most difficult thing about building a private cloud is mastering the inherent data storage challenges involved. Not only does a private cloud usually necessitate adopting object-based storage, making sure that I/O contention is kept to a minimum as multiple applications running on the private cloud try to access the same storage resources is a significant challenge.
To facilitate that transition, Igneous Systems today unfurled the Igneous Data Service, an instance of a managed storage service that smooths the transition to private cloud computing.
Igneous Systems CEO Kiran Bhageshpur says the goal is to allow IT organizations to devote more resources to other tasks such as application management and deployment versus having to contend with lower-level storage issues. By making use of a microservices architecture and application programming interfaces (APIs) that are compatible with the S3 APIs developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Bhageshpur says the Igneous Data Service is designed from the ground up to be simple to deploy.
“It’s designed around zero-touch infrastructure that is all API driven,” says Bhageshpur.
The service itself is designed to make modular units of 212 TB of object-based storage available on premise to IT organizations at a price point that starts under $40,000 per year. Built on top of custom storage servers built using processors from ARM, Igneous Systems, says Bhageshpur, can provision and manage up to 60 units of a 4u storage chassis designed by Igneous Systems.
These days, many IT organizations are still uncomfortable for a variety of reasons with storing data on a public cloud. In terms of IT agility and flexibility, the Igneous Data Service can provide many of the same benefits of a public cloud without data having to leave the local data center. The challenge facing IT organizations now is figuring out the amount of data they want to manage themselves going forward versus making use of a private cloud service that abstracts many of the complexities associated with managing local storage away from the IT organization altogether.
