Storage As A Service?

Blockbridge software allows you to build and consume storage “as a service”. In this model, storage resources and the fabrics that connect them are built, on demand, from what’s available in the infrastructure. A services approach implies an ability for an end user or application to autonomously provision and manage storage in isolation.

The services approach has a dramatic effect on application development, deployment, and management. In practice, the benefits are realized by everyone. Developers get frictionless access to resources, which allows them to build highly orchestrated workflows, manage their own snapshots and easily move storage between hosts. Administrators get unprecedented visibility and control over resource utilization at a per-consumer or application level.

So what kind of storage is in my service?

Fast? Cheap? Dense? Resilient? Isolated? The answer depends on your applications, their specific requirements, and where they are in the development/production life-cycle. The reality is that applications have widely varying storage requirements. For example, traditional databases want high-end storage while newer databases are designed for commodity components. Development virtual machines are perfectly suited for commodity SSDs, where production machines demand enterprise variants with power-loss protection. In practice, storage infrastructure is inherently heterogenous.

If we think more broadly about the practice of operating a service, we’ll see that it embodies more than just offering multiple types of storage. For example, many data centers are organized into multiple availability zones. Similarly, administrators often isolate production equipment from that used for testing. Location, connectivity, proximity, and use-case are as important to the service you provide as media you choose. In fact, they define the service offering itself.

In the demonstration attached to this post, we illustrate these concepts by provisioning storage via attributes that describe the service requirements of an application. Then, we dynamically construct a data fabric to access the storage resources from a host. Sounds fancy! But, it’s a truly simple 2 command workflow. All-in-all, we deliver access to any kind of storage that your infrastructure contains, as fast as you can type the commands. If you listen in, also take note of the isolation requirements that we satisfy that make service oriented storage possible.