Implementing A Multi-Cloud Strategy With A Universal Data Plane 

Sponsored Content by Hedvig

The journey to the cloud is underway. Market efficiencies, economics and technology have advanced to the point where all organizations seek to leverage public clouds. A recent Gartner forecast expects that by 2020 more than $1 trillion in IT spending will either be directly or indirectly affected by the shift to the cloud. Gartner notes that, “this will make cloud computing one of the most disruptive forces of IT spending since the early days of the digital age.”

But this journey will not happen overnight. That means today’s CIOs need a hybrid- and multi-cloud strategy that balances IT services across multiple cloud infrastructures. Advances in containers and orchestration makes application portability among clouds a reality. But what about data portability? It’s simply not possible with traditional storage solutions, which are too inflexible, unscalable, and expensive to integrate public clouds properly.

Implementing a Universal Data Plane for hybrid- and multi-cloud strategies

What if you could overcome these limitations? What if there was a single solution that managed data across any tier, any workload, and any cloud? We believe software-defined storage has evolved to provide such a platform. We call it a Universal Data Plane.

The Universal Data Plane overcomes the rigidity and economics of traditional storage. It provides a single, programmable data management layer that replaces the need for disparate SAN, NAS, object, cloud, backup, replication, and data protection gear. As true software-defined storage, it can be run on commodity servers in private clouds and as instances in public clouds. It’s a virtualized abstraction layer that enables any workload to store and protect its data across any location. It dramatically simplifies operations by plugging into modern orchestration and automation frameworks like Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos, Microsoft, OpenStack and VMware.

Now enterprises can deploy stateless applications, with the Universal Data Plane providing data locality and availability guarantees. Multi-cloud strategies like cloud arbitrage, reverse auctioning, and follow-the-sun become possible. Avoid cloud vendor lock-in by moving workloads seamlessly among clouds. Eliminate downtime by protecting data among a global footprint of private and public cloud sites. And all this without incurring the penalty of moving terabytes or petabytes of data among cloud providers.

What to look for in software-defined storage to implement a Universal Data Plane

To deploy a Universal Data Plane, enterprises need four capabilities:

• A scale-out, software architecture. Scale-up architectures don’t provide the flexibility that cloud infrastructures need. Instead, a scale-out architecture, coupled with a software-defined approach, provides the elasticity to grow data services in lock step with changing business requirements.
• Native, multi-site replication. Modern systems can’t have single points of failure. Nor can they support complex, bolted-on replication to improve availability. A critical element of the Universal Data Plane is the ability to natively replicate data among sites to ensure locality and availability.
• Full automation and orchestration support. Enterprises can no longer suffer the human latency of manually provisioning capacity. New orchestration tools have emerged that create composable infrastructure and storage needs a full suite of APIs to integrate natively into these frameworks.
• Application-specific data services. Not all cloud services are created the same. Each service and application has its own unique data requirements. Modern storage provides the flexibility to give each application a unique policy, which can be augmented automatically as business needs change.

The Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform is the only software-defined storage solution designed from the beginning as a modern, distributed storage platform that enables hybrid- and multi-cloud strategies.

Join us on Tuesday, November 8 at 10:00 AM PT for a live webinar where we will show you how to use Hedvig to build your own Universal Data Plane.