Buyer Case Study Cyber Group Deploys EMC ViPR for Next-Generation SaaS Application Infrastructure Laura DuBois IDC OPINION 3rd Platform computing has given rise to massive scale datacenters architected for a homogeneous scale-out green field application portfolio that leverages disaggregated, high-density, and poweroptimized infrastructures. Increasingly, these datacenters are built using software-defined architectures and applications that are cloud backed, mobility enabled, and analytics infused and carry several characteristics of what IDC refers to as next-generation applications. Next-generation applications tend to be written in modern development languages and frameworks, rely on open source components, and make use of scale-out, distributed software architectures and infrastructure. In addition: Next-generation applications are architected to provide the availability, resiliency, and recovery capabilities that were once resident in the underlying hardware. Leading hyperscale datacenter operators such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook now rely on this model. In essence, the expectation is that hardware will always fail, and so software and the underlying infrastructure need to be designed in such a way as to elegantly handle and provide the same, if not better, levels of availability, resiliency, and recovery as have been achievable when the underlying hardware provided for this. As more applications are architected and built with this in mind, these applications will increasingly make use of industry-standard, off-the-shelf hardware components as the underlying basis for compute resources and persistent storage. Object-based storage (OBS) continues to see increased demand from all corners of the storage market. Existing use cases such as information digitization, data retention policies, and globally dispersed information sharing all aimed at controlling the insatiable appetites for data consumption are increasingly moving to file-based storage (FBS) and/or object-based storage. Technologically, FBS and OBS solutions are converging. FBS solutions are increasingly becoming object aware with the adoption of metadata-based parallel, clustered, or distributed file systems and newer OBS data interfaces. OBS solutions, on the other hand, are getting increasingly file friendly with the adoption of FBS interfaces. IDC believes that in 2014, FOBS will be in the middle of a new phase of growth where, in the very near future, the management and organization of files and objects as quanta of information accessed from geographically dispersed locations will become the primary task for many datacenter planners and administrators. This shift will have a significant impact on how companies assess storage solutions in terms of systems' performance, operational efficiency, and file services intelligence. November 2014, IDC #252419
IN THIS BUYER CASE STUDY This IDC Buyer Case Study provides an overview of Cyber Group, a leading software developer that has built a next-generation application for secure, compliant, SaaS-based content archiving, document management, and case management. Cyber Group has implemented the EMC ViPR controller and APIS, with support for OpenStack Swift and Amazon S3 for the deployment of its application infrastructure, specifically as its back-end object infrastructure. SITUATION OVERVIEW Cyber Group (see cygrp.com) is a United States based firm that provides professional engineering services in hardware, software, and solutions. Since 1998, the company has been providing these services to businesses throughout a wide array of industries, including retail, energy, security, and industrial IT. Cyber Group's embedded systems engineers design and develop hardware solutions, while the company's software development team writes and implements next-generation applications. For customers that require cloud and mobility services, Cyber Group's engineer teams can integrate various systems together to allow for round-the-clock connectivity. In developing next-generation applications for its customers, Cyber Group saw a need that was underserved in the market, namely a SaaS service and application for enterprise-level compliance-based content archiving with rich metadata handling and support for document and case management workflows. Organization Overview Cyber Group has a background in writing applications using agile development processes and differentiates itself in using what it refers to as AgileShoring. The company has developed hundreds of applications for clients that are cloud backed and mobile device supported and leverage modern development frameworks and languages. Cyber Group seeks to leverage this institutional knowledge in writing modern applications, and its strategy is to bring to market a SaaS-based offering for secure, compliance-driven enterprise content management (ECM) built on top of the EMC ViPR APIs. This ECM application, called Elastic Content Vault (ECV), will offer case management and document management features and leverage an object store for retaining and accessing rich media (audio, video) and office documents. ECV will support the archiving and content-based search and access to unstructured content including content from legacy on-premise ECM repositories and file systems. With this new offering, Cyber Group will target regulated industries such as financial services, insurance, and mortgage institutions. ECV will differ from other well-known SaaS ECM offerings such as Box by offering rich governance and compliance features and enable metadata-driven policies and controls. Challenges and Solution The challenge for any innovative company like Cyber Group is how to develop a new SaaS application and service in a manner which is cost effective, without building out a massive IT infrastructure before it has released a product or service. According to Cyber Group's Senior Vice President of Engineering Services Ron Redmer, "Our objective is to build this new SaaS application, which we are calling ECV, with 75% of the features of an enterprise EMC solution but at 50% less cost." With this in mind, 2014 IDC #252419 2
infrastructure cost was an overarching imperative in particular, when storing large BLOBs that are retained for long periods of time and that can be resistant to the effectiveness of storage efficiency technologies. Moreover, as with any SaaS provider, the value to the customer is in the service that is provided rather than the back-end infrastructure. It is not uncommon for service providers to save as much as 50% in initial capital costs by leveraging industry-standard, off-the-shelf servers and JBOD capacity rather than a branded, commercial storage array. However, with this model, it is imperative that the application architecture handles resiliency and availability. As with most next-generation software architectures, ECV leverages open source components, industry standards, and cloud services where feasible. The presentation layer for this new application leverages an HTML5 Web UI, RESTful APIs, and a mobile UI/UX. As content is ingested into the system, a full content index is built using the Apache Lucene text search engine as well as to provide enhanced search using Coveo. The application object metadata is stored in an XML NoSQL database stored on block storage internal to the database server. SecureAuth is being used for identity management, single sign-on, and multifactor authentication. ECV uses the ViPR controller with both Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift APIs support to write objects to commodity storage. With a focus on rich media serving and fixed content archiving for compliance purposes, Cyber Group sought out a massively scalable object store software stack that could provide the following features: Rich metadata handling for ediscovery, tagging, and search purposes Massive, scale-out architecture using commodity hardware for lower TCO Handle large, sequential rich media files such as audio files Support multiple data protocols, enabling different workflows and access mechanisms to leverage the same data Flexible service deployable (on-premise) or via a SaaS subscription Cyber Group evaluated both open source and commercial offerings that could provide an object store with flexible, standards-based APIs; enable file workflows on top of objects; support both commercial and commodity storage architectures; and be scalable to support public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments. According to Redmer, "We needed a rich API-driven process to associate objects not only to our ECM application but also external case management systems and file systems." ViPR was the only solution that enabled this. See Figure 1 for an architecture diagram of the Cyber Group application. 2014 IDC #252419 3
FIGURE 1 Cyber Group Elastic Content Vault Architecture Source: Cyber Group, 2014 Results At the infrastructure layer, Cyber Group has ECV deployed today using the ViPR controller with Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift APIs and x86 servers with internal storage and stores 200TB of legal documents. According to Redmer, "ViPR controller software component was easy to implement. We use commodity platforms today and customers want commodity storage pricing. But we anticipate the need to support NetApp systems and EMC arrays. In particular, if a customer needs a private or hybrid cloud deployment." Essential to one of the ECV key use cases was API-driven ingestion of objects for archive but while offering a simple, standard file interface for auditors to use for data search and collection. ECV offers ediscovery tools right in the workflow, exposing ViPR objects using file system semantics and structure. The ViPR controller provides a file system capability layered over object storage to provide users a file system view of objects. This allows auditors or others to aggregate information for compliance and legal collection purposes. Why important? Traditionally, it has been really hard to access objects independently from the application that was used to write the objects to the object 2014 IDC #252419 4
store. The application can then offer reporting on a set of governance users but put content in different access groups for proactive file systems governance and reporting. Data can be ingested into ECV using a commercial cloud gateway, and Cyber Group also offers a utility to pull data out of Documentum, OpenText, and/or IBM FileNet and ingest it into the Media Cloud application. If the customer has a homegrown ECM application, the company can develop an extractor to get data out and stage it to a file system. Then use a standard import tool to ingest data into the ECV. Redmer elaborated on the benefits of EMC ViPR over market alternatives: ViPR is easier to install on-premises and reduces storage management administration, whereas OpenStack and Azure (System Center) are much more complex to configure and increase administration. According to Redmer, "We looked at using an OpenStack distribution without the ViPR controller. But, with OpenStack, how easy is it to stand up and administer? The main selling point of ViPR is that it aggregates and abstracts storage but without the need to have rocket scientists on my team." ViPR provides a more streamlined and sensible file system capability layered over object storage so that objects in the system can be easily accessed according to the security rules using low-cost off-the-shelf software. ViPR provides a very simple-to-administer multitenant capability with security and replication that meets compliance needs right out of the box. Redmer said, "True multisite replication on OpenStack and Azure (System Center) on-prem is clunky and requires much more significant bandwidth and administration." Redmer says, "EMC technical support is a great selling point for us as we will need to support this offering as a SaaS service as well as in private and hybrid cloud deployments. While the initial intent with ECV is to offer a SaaS application, some companies will want an on-premise solution and the ViPR controller and EMC hardware, allowing the company to take this solution and build an on-premise, EMC-branded enterprise solution." Cyber Group will make its multitenant SaaS application Elastic Content Vault generally available in December 2014. The company plans to have two subscription service models for customers. The first subscription service model is to offer a subscription to the ECV-hosted, multitenant private cloud service, which is built with an EMC private cloud provider leveraging the ViPR software-defined storage software stack and the VCE vblock infrastructure. This service will be targeted at SMB customers. The second subscription service model is to license the ECV software for enterprise use. In this model, Cyber Group will provide best practices for hosting the software on EMC hybrid cloud and OpenStack-enabled clouds (see Figure 2). Cyber Group will also offer installation, integration, customization, and software security consulting services. According to Redmer, "Almost all of these customers are going to want some level of integration with their existing line-of-business systems and that serves our core AgileShoring business model." The company anticipates that in 2015 it will roll out support for Amazon S3 and Glacier storages. 2014 IDC #252419 5
FIGURE 2 Cyber Group Elastic Content Vault Use of EMC Hybrid Cloud Source: Cyber Group, 2014 ESSENTIAL GUIDANCE Service providers of all types including SaaS providers offering homogeneous application services will increasingly be pressured to reduce their operational costs to deliver the service. In use cases and environments where the amount of data scales to billions of objects and petabytes of data, the economic advantages of leveraging server-based storage and JBOD capacity cannot be overlooked. While not suitable for all environments, this new type of storage deployment will be popular among service providers that offer a new service. Conversely, enterprise customers that seek hybrid or private cloud deployments will continue to gravitate to appliance-based delivery of storage solutions from leading storage OEMs. Firms considering a software-defined storage such as EMC ViPR must consider a full cost-benefit analysis. A software-defined storage deployment may not necessary warrant a software-only deployment. Conversely, IDC views that traditional enterprise customers will increasingly seek more aggregated solutions such as those covered by IDC's integrated infrastructure and platforms research. However, for firms that are developing next-generation applications with archive, analytics, and search 2014 IDC #252419 6
requirements, a back-end object store is and will be the next-generation storage architecture for these environments. LEARN MORE For additional information on Cyber Group, refer to the company Web site at cygrp.com or contact the company at 469-916-7730. Related Research IDC's Worldwide File- and Object-Based Storage Taxonomy, 2014 (IDC #245940, January 2014) IDC QuickPoll: Trends in File and Object-Based Storage Environments (IDC #245090, December 2013) IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Object-Based Storage 2013 Vendor Assessment (IDC #244081, October 2013) Worldwide File- and Object-Based Storage 2013 2017 Forecast (IDC #242287, July 2013) 2014 IDC #252419 7
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