In last week's post, we looked at a few of the key architectural requirements for a scale-out storage infrastructure, including a unified 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE) network that supports diverse protocols. Today, we’ll look at some of the business benefits of scale-out storage.

Lower capital cost—Scale-out storage arrays typically cost less than enterprise-class storage. On a price/terabyte basis, some scale-out arrays sell for half the price of conventional enterprise storage systems. When you’re adding storage often to keep pace with data growth, these upfront savings become more important.

Lower operational costs—Scale-out storage architectures can deliver operational savings via management simplicity. With a unified 10GbE network, you have fewer protocols to manage and fewer management tools to buy, use, and maintain. And the tools you use tend to be lower-cost, thanks to open standards.

High availability backup and recovery—Scale-out storage can provide continuous high-availability backup and recovery, as you would get with more expensive storage. You’re just getting the benefits at a better price. Scale-out storage allows you to keep your backup data more accessible than it would be with conventional tape-based backup and an offsite data infrastructure. With near-real-time data, you’re poised to quickly bounce back from a failure or a disaster. Think hours instead of days.

Cloud benefits—Scale-out storage allows you to deploy a private cloud that delivers the cost benefits that Tier 1 public cloud providers realize. And when you have your storage in a cloud environment, you are better positioned to eventually move non-critical content to a public cloud. All that video you’re storing? How about moving it to a public cloud?

Examine scale out storage solutions from EMC, NetApp, Compellent and others. You may find some surprising results. … and if you don’t, let us know why not?

If you’ve taken any psychology, you’re probably come across Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This landmark model, often illustrated with a pyramid, explores human needs, from the most basic physiological level to the ultimate state of self-actualization.

While I won’t promise you anything quite so lofty, I will suggest that Maslow’s hierarchal approach to understanding human needs creates a workable model for understanding the power management needs in your data center. So let’s walk through this power hierarchy of needs.

Efficient equipment—As a first step, use efficient servers, storage systems, and networking devices. For example, better motherboard designs can increase thermal efficiency and allow fans to run at lower speeds. And integrated power gates within a CPU can allow individual idling cores to drop to near-zero power consumption.

Efficient facility designs—Design and modify your data center facilities to conserve energy and make optimum use of your cooling and air handling systems. One basic step is to use hot and cold server aisles so you don’t mix hot exhaust air from servers with cool air from the chiller.

Consolidated systems—Use virtualization or other techniques to consolidate your environment to a smaller number of better-utilized systems. And then turn off the power to all those unused systems.

Power capping—Place power caps on underutilized systems. With the right tools and systems, you can throttle system and rack power usage based on expected workloads. This capability, in turn, can allow you to place more servers in your racks, to make better use of both power and space.

Workload optimization—Use intelligent workload placement to improve thermal dynamics and optimize energy usage. The idea is to dynamically move workloads to the optimal servers based on power policies.

If you take all of these steps, I can’t say that you’ll reach a self-actualized state, as in Maslow’s hierarchy. But I can promise that you’ll be operating a more efficient data center and making better use of your power dollars.

In enterprise environments, people are getting serious about cloud computing. An IDC survey found that 44 percent of respondents were considering private clouds. So what’s holding people back? In a word: security. To move to a cloud (private or public) environment, you must be sure you can protect the security of applications and the privacy of information.

These requirements are particularly rigid if you are subject to PCI-DSS regulations for credit card transactions or HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) regulations for medical records. Compliance depends on your ability to maintain the privacy of the information, generally through isolation of storage systems, networks, and virtual machines.

To achieve this level of security, an “air gap” is often used to ensure sensitive systems are isolated. This approach works but severely limits your flexibility and ability to adapt to changing conditions. So perhaps we should consider instead a “virtual air gap.” Let’s look at how you might maintain this virtual separation of systems.

Storage isolation: One way to implement storage isolation is to encrypt data when it is in motion and at rest in the cloud environment. Another best practice is the striping of data across systems. This approach breaks blocks of data into multiple pieces that are spread over different disk drives that exist in different administrative zones. This helps protect you from rouge admins, who could access only a fraction of a file, rather than the whole.

Network isolation:Sensitive applications should be placed on a controlled VLAN. You then put mechanisms in place to monitor the configuration of routers and switches to verify that no unauthorized changes have taken place.

Virtual machine isolation: Virtual machines implement the “air gap” but the quality of the gap is only as good as the versions of hypervisor and the configuration. But how can cloud providers prove that they are using the expected versions on the expected hardware? Using a hardware-based root of trust to provide the evidence of hardware and software is a powerful tool for this challenge. A hardware root of trust provides a hardware-level mechanism to attest to the configuration of the hypervisors and enable the isolation and safe migration of virtual machines (to other trusted platforms).

Audits:Having a sound security practice is good but in reality we have to implement an audit to sample the point-in-time processes and technology. Standards such as ISO 27002 for information security and SAS 70 for maintenance of internal controls can help. Also, the Cloud Security Alliance has a solid collection of best practices for security in the cloud.

At a high level, these are just some of the steps you can take to implement and maintain a “virtual air gap.”