TAD HUNT: Hi, everybody.
Today, we're going to talk about optimizing
file storage for your use case.
I'm Tad Hunt, and I manage the Filestore portfolio
on Google Cloud.
I have a few goals for this talk.
First, you walk away with an understanding
that Google Cloud is ready for your applications that
need file storage.
Second, if you're migrating File workloads to Cloud,
you understand that you don't have
to re-architect for alternative storage solutions.
Correspondingly, if you are running workloads in Cloud that
might benefit from file, you now know
how to take advantage of it.
And finally, this knowledge enables
you to simplify and accelerate your public cloud [INAUDIBLE]..
To set some early context so you can get the most out
of your time, we'll start with an overview of why
File is important, then deep dive into Filestore
and a couple of key file partnerships,
and then we'll wrap it up by tying it all together.
So first, the file landscape.
So let's start by answering the question,
where do I store my data?
In a taxonomy of storage systems,
we generally break it down into structured,
i.e. databases, and unstructured storage systems, generally file
block and object.
File storage is generally focused on unstructured data
storage problems and is critically important
for enterprise applications like SAP,
infrastructure like VMware, and all sorts of things in between.
Since this is an intermediate-level talk,
I'm going to assume you're somewhat familiar with shared
file storage, commonly known as NAS, or Network-Attached
Storage.
If you've made it this far, chances
are that you have a file storage problem
that you need to solve in GCP, so we
will be focusing on file capabilities, use
cases, and workloads.
It all starts here.
Shared file systems are the arteries
of enterprise applications.
When the public cloud was born, it
didn't have traditional file services.
It had brand-new, cool stuff like object storage,
which enabled brand new use cases and application
architectures.
But lack of shared file services meant
that the cloud just was not ready for most enterprise
applications.
Today, Google Cloud is ready.
We offer a mature set of file storage services, both natively
and from industry-leading partners.
Look, we all know that file workloads
are incredibly varied.
And as a consequence, there's not a single file storage
solution for all use cases.
This view you see here is one way to slice and dice it.
Sometimes, GCP's offering, Filestore,
will be the best choice, and sometimes, it'll
be a partner offering.
For these reasons, we are committed
to supporting a strong partner ecosystem.
Eliminating friction from cloud migrations
often means providing the same tools in the cloud
as customers are using on-premise, usually
due to the advanced features their applications depend on.
Our partners complement Filestore
with things like extreme scale app capacity and performance,
rich and deep feature sets with long histories baked deeply
into enterprise infrastructure, support for hybrid cloud
and container storage, the ability
to stitch together many distributed sites,
and of course, there's many more.
We believe that a capable Google offering coupled
with a strong partner ecosystem recruits the best
expertise across the industry to solve
the problems you care about.
The end result is you get the best solution for your problem.
And we can't hope to cover everything today,
so we're going to focus on a few examples
where some of these different solutions excel.
So that's the landscape.
Next, let's dive into how Filestore fits.
Let's start with how one of our Filestore customers
is leveraging Filestore to enable their business.
Filestore has been generally available since April 2019,
and Flywheel has been along for the ride.
They're huge fans because their WordPress hosting business
depends on reliable and performant file storage.
Filestore provides that, while simultaneously enabling
Flywheel to get out of the storage infrastructure
management business.
What is Filestore good at?
So more than this, of course.
But some of the key workloads that we've
already tuned Filestore are media rendering,
application migrations, web content management,
which is what Flywheel is doing, media processing,
and software development and testing.
So how do we help customers like Flywheel,
or for that matter, you, focus on your business?
We make it easy to pick the right Filestore
tier for your workload by offering two flavors.
First, we have Filestore Basic, which is generally available
and has been since April 2019, and we just
launched Filestore High Scale to beta
in June, so just not too long ago
if you're watching this in July.
So Filestore Basic is optimized for enterprise workloads that
don't have large capacity and performance demands,
but they do require enterprise-class reliability,
whereas High Scale is optimized for use when
performance and scalability are really
critical to your applications.
You may be aware that last August,
we acquired a company called Elastifile.
High Scale is our first Filestore product
built by the integrated team, and it's based
on the Elastifile file system.
So let's talk for a minute about performance.
Filestore offers great latency, IOPS,
and throughput-- as I like to say,
the trifecta of storage performance.
Equally as important, not only do you get great performance,
but you get consistent performance, too,
and this enables predictability for your applications.
We offer three Filestore performance tiers
to optimize for workloads with different performance needs.
For example, if your workload is a low-traffic enterprise app,
say a web app with low usage, you
might just deploy a Filestore Basic HDD instance.
On the other hand, maybe you have a render farm
built on preemptible VMs with thousands of nodes
and 10 thousands of cores.
You might pick High Scale to minimize your render times.
Or maybe your app is somewhere between.
Maybe you're an intense random read or random write workload,
but you've only got a few clients.
Maybe you'd like a Monte Carlo simulation for a single user.
Maybe that is the right signal to pick Filestore Basic SSD,
in order to get the maximum single-client IOPS.
So we didn't just make Filestore fast,
we also made it simple to reason about the price
and the performance that you get.
When performance and capacity are the key needs,
Filestore High Scale fits the bill.
For those of you with advanced file system knowledge,
Filestore Basic is a scale-up architecture,
while Filestore High Scale is a scale-out architecture.
What this means is that High Scale performance
scales linearly with capacity and it can handle
an enormous number of clients.
With all of our Filestore tiers, you just
pick a tier and a size at creation time
so that you know immediately what your performance
characteristics are.
And since we don't charge per-operation fees,
you also know immediately what your spend will be,
and we even show you an estimate in the console.
So Harvard selected the Elastifile-based Google
Filestore for its extremely powerful performance,
customization capabilities, and simplicity of use.
This is an example of where Filestore High Scale has helped
Harvard with COVID-19 research.
They've been doing virtual screenings
of potential COVID-19 treatments and they've
found some promising candidates through this research.
We've got a really extensive write-up
about this on our launch blog that's linked here.
This is a good example of a batch compute workload
where Filestore's scale-out performance
helps with high throughput computing workloads.
Which is kind of a good segue into our tech specs,
since we're getting a little bit technical, anyway.
First, I'm going to cover a gestalt
of what I'm showing you here.
I'm not going to just read the slide to you.
So first, Filestore is a zonal service.
It offers an SLA of three nines for the basic tiers, which
when High Scale launches to GA, we'll also match in High Scale.
With Filestore Basic, you can go up to 64
T. In High Scale, that extends that up to 320 T.
You don't have to start with a large filer
because for all of these variants of Filestore,
you can actually grow online with no downtime, on demand.
For protocol support, we've got you
covered with NFS, which is kind of the Linux
industry-leading protocol.
We also include file locking, and this
is true across all tiers.
I would say generally, NFS can sometimes
work for Microsoft Windows workloads,
but most of the time, we would recommend a partner offering,
and I'll talk about that a little later
if you have a Windows workload.
This is a Google product, so you get Google-grade encryption
and security, including encryption at rest.
We also recently rolled out beat support for per-IP range NFS
security controls.
If you're an NFS expert, what I'm about to say
would mean something to you.
Otherwise, you'll be like, eh?
So anyway, NFS has the ability to set
this thing called root squash.
And of course, read-only export modes, I think,
is pretty self-explanatory.
Root squash is a user ID mapping so that you can make sure
that root on the client is not allowed
to access the file system and do some remapping there.
We're also integrated with Stackdriver,
which enables you to set up alerts,
for example, if free space gets too low,
or if you deleted a bunch of data
and you realize you're wasting a lot of space.
And also, when you have application performance issues,
we have a whole host of biometrics
that you can look at to help you identify
why your applications might be performing
as well as they should be.
Finally, there's three ways to configure and manage Filestore.
You can do it through the command line,
through the standard Google Cloud API,
and of course, we've got the web console.
This is obviously a brief overview
of what Filestore offers, so check out our docs at the link
here for more details.
Moving on from the core file features,
I want to talk about some of the integrations.
Some of the highlights here are for Compute Engine,
we fully support preemptible VMs,
which are commonly used to optimize cost
for batch workloads.
In Kubernetes Engine, you can use Filestore automatically
and configure it automatically through the native NFS
plugins through the CSI interface, as well.
On the networking side, Filestore
is peered with your VPC network, and that
enables you to access it from authorized clients
on that network.
And then based on the IP access control
feature I mentioned on the prior slide,
you can further restrict which of those VMs on your VPC
are allowed to access it.
We talked about Stackdriver already.
And then last, but not least, for the config-as-code
and the infrastructure-as-code models
that many enterprises are using today,
we're integrated with Deployment Manager and Terraform.
So moving on, so let's say that your workload fits into one
of the Filestore tiers.
You've decided that.
You've checked it out.
It seems to fit the bill.
One of the next things on your mind is probably,
where do I have to put my app to take advantage of it?
For Filestore Basic, the answer is anywhere
Google Cloud has a region, you can use it there.
We're in all the regions.
For High Scale, we just launched,
and we're already in one region in each of the US, European,
and Asian markets.
And as the product matures, we'll of course
show up in more places.
I should note that this is a point-in-time view from July
2020.
If you're watching this in the far future
and you need High Scale in a region not listed here,
check out the docs.
Chances are, things have changed.
At any point in time, if you do think
that High Scale is what you need and it's not available
and you need it, please just reach out to your account
manager to discuss options.
They can get in touch with me and my team
and we can probably hook you up.
I'm going to wrap up the Filestore section
by just briefly covering a couple of backup partner
integrations, and then we're going
to move on to other file partner integrations.
The first is Actifio Sky, which provides application
consistent backup and recovery.
And here's some information and some links
for you to check out more.
And then we'll move on to Commvault,
which is designed to protect data residing in Filestore
and many other.
Commvault and Actifio are both very well-known partner
offerings for backups.
Commvault enables efficient and secure backups
via their compression, deduplication, and encryption
engines, and they enable recovery to any Cloud Filestore
instance, or you can even restore your data directly
to any Windows or Linux computers.
And that about wraps it up for Filestore.
Before we move on to talk about our file partnerships,
the links here will help jump help you jump in to get
started with provisioning and managing
any of your Filestore instances.
So moving on to file partners, as I mentioned in the landscape
section, we integrate with partners
for a wide range of use cases.
And that means we work with way too many partners for me
to cover in one overview video.
For this talk, I'll focus on Dell EMC and NetApp
because these are the two partners we've integrated
most deeply into the platform.
So for example, they're integrated directly
into our Cloud Console for provisioning and managing
of your file systems.
They're integrated into Cloud Billing,
so you get a single bill from Google with everything on it.
And they're integrated with Cloud Support,
so you don't have to guess at who to reach out
to if you have an issue.
You just contact us, like you would for anything else.
If your use case doesn't seem to be covered by Dell or NetApp--
for example, you might have a low-latency HPC workload that
relies on Luster, or maybe you have a branch office workload
where you've got 1,000 branch offices that all need
access to the same file for collaboration-- or anything
else that Filestore or one of these two partners
doesn't seem to be a good fit for, please reach out
to us through your account manager
and like I mentioned before, we'll help you get started
with the right solution.
So let's jump in with Dell's new offering.
Previously, you might have known this next product
I'm going to described as Isilon or OneFS,
but Dell just went through a rebranding exercise
to bring all of the EMC product branding in line
with the rest of the Dell ecosystem.
And going forward, it's now just called PowerScale.
Still with the same goodness inside, just with the new name.
So PowerScale for Google Cloud launch
to general availability just a couple of months ago,
this past May.
It provides an enterprise-class native cloud experience
for enabling organizations to accelerate innovation
for high performance applications,
such as analytics, media and entertainment, and life
sciences.
PowerScale is built on the mature Isilon OneFS file
system, and all of its capabilities
are now available in GCP.
Additionally, the fact that this is a managed service
brings some things you don't get on-premises.
Namely, you get an SLA, experts from Google and Dell
who manage the service so you don't have to,
and you're billed only for what you use.
You don't have to buy a whole bunch of space
like you do on-prem, because hard drives are large.
For more information or how to get started,
you can visit the link here, or just search Google.
It works pretty well, too.
This is going to be a really brief overview
of these couple of partners.
So next up, we're going to dive into NetApp.
Dell has one really big offering,
and NetApp really has two offerings.
They have Cloud Volumes Service, and we'll
talk about that, and Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
One is a managed service and one is a self-managed solution.
We're going to start with Cloud Volumes Service.
Cloud Volumes Service has been GA since October 2019,
and is a fully-managed storage solution
delivering high performance and low latency for application
workloads, such as SAP HANA, Google Cloud VMware
Engine, and Microsoft Windows.
If you remember from before when I said Filestore is not
great for Microsoft Windows workloads,
one of these partner offerings is.
They both have very, very mature Microsoft Windows stacks.
That protocol is called SMB, so they
have very mature SMB stacks.
So NetApp Cloud Volumes Service was
designed with the application owner in mind.
It looks and feels like a native Google service, including
the integrations into the console, the billing,
and support that I mentioned before.
And then in addition to that, it has
three different price-performance tiers,
as well as the ability to scale performance dynamically up
and down with your application and user requirements.
This ensures that your application
is right-sized through its development, test,
and production lifecycle.
Additionally it comes with an SLA
of three nines, which means it's ready for your production use
cases.
And then here's the link to get more information
or get started.
NetApp's second service is called Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
So when your needs extend beyond the capabilities
of Cloud Volumes Service, the product I just talked about,
NetApp also offers Cloud Volumes ONTAP as a self-managed storage
solution.
So it delivers nearly the entire set of storage management
and data optimization capabilities
available to on-premise NetApp ONTAP users today.
So if you're coming from on-premise
and you're already relying on a lot of NetApp features,
this might be a good offering for you.
It's really designed for storage administrators
that are familiar with the NetApp ONTAP operating system.
It provides a seamless method to accelerate migration
of your on-premise application workloads,
as well ensure your on-premise data
is protected safely in the cloud for archive and disaster
recovery use cases.
Again, for more information or to get started,
check out this link here.
And that brings us to the end.
At this point, we're going to wrap it up.
So going back to the intro, tying it all together,
shared file systems are the arteries
of enterprise applications.
And everything we've covered can be boiled down to the fact
that GCP is ready for these workloads.
I started with my goals for this talk, which
are that you walk away understanding that
not only have Google Cloud's file capabilities matured,
but now you have some idea of how
to leverage them to simplify and accelerate your public cloud
file storage [INAUDIBLE].
Thank you.
I hope this talk has helped light the path.
Thanks for your time.