After thinking about the concept of Data Value, and in particular data insurance, I’ve started to wonder if the following is true:
As the economic value of data rises, the need for it to be stored on trusted infrastructure rises as well.
In my last post I quoted my colleague Nikhil Sharma‘s recent blog post about Trusted Infrastructure:
Trusted Infrastructure will need an open abstraction layer, Trust APIs, for use in higher level stacks like Hypervisor or Cloud OS.
I understand and agree with his thinking. The marriage between data value and trusted infrastructure means that higher level data placement software will need access to Trust APIs at the hypervisor and/or cloud layer. These Trust APIs will need to present a “trusted” view of the overall data center infrastructure (e.g. server, network, storage, security, etc). These views will take into account the full spectrum of trust dimensions:
How will the storage layer participate in surfacing these trust dimensions? After all, the economic value of data is calculated by analyzing each data set as it exists on specific storage devices. How does one describe the trust level of those devices (and any corresponding control-plane software)? One key trust dimension here is transparency. Once again I relied on Nikhil’s point of view on this topic:
The standardized trust transparency needs to be declarative in nature. Storage will declare “these are the trust features that I have”.
In many of today’s data center architectures this feature is missing. The figure below highlights a basic diagram of a software-defined storage layer which translates specific application storage requirements into a correctly provisioned storage repository for that application.
In order to surface trust characteristics up through the software-defined storage layer, devices need to advertise a standardized trust taxonomy:
There are storage systems today that already surface a variety of trust capabilities, but none that run the full spectrum of the six trust dimensions highlighted above.
In addition to the storage layer, this trust taxonomy must also be communicated by non-storage devices that are part of the overall cloud implementation.
I will dive into tying trust to data value at the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) layer in a future post.
Steve
EMC Fellow
