Page 15 - FCW, May 2017

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Drive Data to the Cloud
Rapidly expanding disparate data stores are the perfect case for moving to the cloud.
Government agencies are under pressure from all sides to improve efficiency. Not only must they meet a variety of mandates, but they must find ways to use existing technology more efficiently and drastically reduce costs across the board. Addressing all of these issues is a constant challenge and requires a multi-pronged approach. Federal IT leaders know that one way or another, the path forward is through the cloud.
(vFXT) Edge filers, for example, can act as network-attached storage in the compute cloud, connecting on-premises storage to cloud compute resources.
with 3.5 petabytes less storage capacity than it needed, the CDC chose Avere FXT Edge filers to store data, along with FlashMove to migrate live data between
Embracing the cloud can seem like an impossible task, but only if you think of it as an all-or-nothing proposition, says Jeff Tabor, a senior director at Avere Systems, which delivers file system and caching technologies that speed access to compute and storage in hybrid environments. For most agencies, moving 100 percent of compute and storage to the cloud doesn’t make sense. A more practical solution embraces a combined infrastructure of both on- premises and the cloud.
“APPLICATIONS WITH THE HIGHEST PERFORMANCE AND CAPACITY REQUIREMENTS ARE LEADING
THE WAY TO THE CLOUD.”
—JEFF TABOR, SENIOR DIRECTOR, AVERE SYSTEMS
This means agencies can continue using existing servers, which are often ideal for steady-state workloads. This eliminates the problem of expensive servers sitting idle in a data center when they aren’t needed. Then they can add cloud capacity during peak times.
DATA OVERLOAD
“You want to protect the investment you have made in your infrastructure, and you probably have older or custom applications your agency really needs but are too difficult or impossible to move to the cloud,” says Tabor.
Agencies are also struggling with ways to store a wide variety of rapidly-growing data stores. This includes unstructured, file-based data such as digital images, video, audio, genomic sequences, financial transaction records, and many types of sensor data.
Combining cloud-based storage with on-premises storage also helps facilitate big data analytics. For example, it makes processing large volumes of network PCAP (packet capture) data collected in Hadoop, Splunk or Vertica environments faster and more straightforward. It also improves analysis involving image processing and scientific data sets.
In terms of compute capacity, it’s common for agencies to run out over time. And because of current mandates, it’s not practical to buy more servers. Running out of capacity is especially common during periods of peak use, such as analyzing intelligence data before a mission, providing access to evidence data after
a terror attack or analyzing tax returns during tax season.
Most agencies are drowning in data
and don’t have the option to expand their data centers. In those cases, it makes sense to move some portion of that data to the cloud. It’s especially useful for bulky data such as video or satellite imagery. With the majority of data in the cloud, agencies can make good use of existing storage capacity in data centers to retain the most active five or 10 percent of their data.
“Applications with the highest performance and capacity requirements are leading the way to the cloud, because they are growing fast and simply not sustainable in data centers,” says Tabor. “But we expect others to follow suit.
It just doesn’t make sense to keep ‘reinventing the wheel’ in small data centers all over the country.”
multiple sources and FlashMirror to replicate data between sources. The result has been better performance, easier data transfer, simplified operations for scientists, and knowing future data expansion won’t be an issue.
The cloud can help resolve these problems by providing virtually limitless resources without adding additional infrastructure. Avere’s Virtual FXT
That’s the route Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took to better manage its genomic sequencing environment. Faced with a data center
For more information visit averesystems.com/public-sector