06 November 2011 Posted by Paul Burns
Understanding Cloud Storage
During the first few years of the multi-year industry shift to the cloud, cloud-based servers garnered much of the attention. Only recently has the adoption of cloud storage accelerated. There are at least two important reasons for this lag.
First, some cloud storage providers have struggled to find the mix of services, features and price that appeal to enterprise IT organizations. In fact, most have still not succeeded here. While there are some interesting file sharing services emerging, enterprise CIOs demand unlimited file sizes, massive scale, global storage locations and instant access, self-healing, data consistency, military-level security and more.
Second, confusion caused by “cloudwashing”—where vendors label existing products and services as “cloud” when they lack essential attributes of cloud computing—has further slowed adoption. When cloud storage offerings require up-front payment, charge a fixed fee regardless of usage, require purchase in large increments, lack pooling of storage resources or fail to provide a useable cloud API, potential users should see red flags. Some vendors have even positioned storage hardware alone as “cloud storage” or even worse as “cloud in a box.”
Organizations evaluating cloud storage services should look for and expect:
- Usage-based pricing—based on actual consumption
- Elasticity to rapidly scale both up AND down
- Multi-tenancy, so businesses and departments can be managed separately
- Aggregation of storage resources into a single, universally accessible pool
- A Web-based object store with support for cloud APIs (REST & SOAP)
- A service—rather than hardware or just software—with accompanying SLAs
There is also good news for users and vendors alike. As cloud storage providers find the right capabilities and business models, and as users become more discerning of cloud offerings, the adoption of cloud storage is taking off.
Challenges with Hybrid Cloud Storage
Cloud services take several forms. Public clouds offer subscribers storage, compute and other services hosted on shared infrastructure. This provides the pay-per-use financial model users seek while maintaining the ability to rapidly scale up and down in response to business needs. It also avoids capital spending and bypasses the cumbersome capital budgeting process. For some applications and data, however, IT seeks the local access, control and governance offered by a private cloud. In this case they trade off some of the advantages of public clouds in order to use on-premise, dedicated infrastructure. Hybrid clouds are yet another option and provide the benefits of both public and private clouds.
With hybrid cloud storage, organizations may position frequently accessed data on site for rapid access. Data that is needed less often, such as archived transaction histories or document images, is stored in the public cloud where it can still be quickly and transparently accessed when needed. Similarly, on-site data may be replicated to the public cloud for disaster-recovery purposes. With a hybrid cloud, data can be automatically shifted back and forth as the business requires, with the public cloud providing capacity on demand whenever it is needed. The benefits of hybrid cloud storage are compelling: local control for some data, plus unlimited capacity without over-provisioning.
The time-consuming process of acquiring physical storage systems to support unexpected spikes in business or seasonal events—including manufacturing lead times for systems vendors and corporate procurement officials—becomes a simple few clicks of the mouse from your in-house data center to “burst” to the public cloud for as much capacity, bandwidth and availability as you need and when you need it. Cloudbursting is becoming an increasingly attractive capability of a hybrid cloud storage deployment because it gives you your own dedicated in-house cloud with a virtual pool of exabytes standing right behind it. In some ways, companies look at hybrid clouds as their “immediate capacity back up plan.”
However, just as with cloud compute services, users must be able to see beyond the cloudwashing to find the optimal value they seek. Some storage vendors are too quick to label their boxes as hybrid. Some talk hybrid cloud but expect you to handle the public cloud federation aspects. Some offerings provide a portal with public and private cloud usage statistics. Of course that does little to actually fulfill the promise of hybrid cloud storage.
Cloudwashing isn’t the only challenge with finding a viable hybrid cloud storage solution. Some vendors see hybrid cloud as an integration project, combining components and services from other service providers to create an offering. This approach may provide much of the functionality users want. However, when CIOs make commitments to the business, they better be able to back them up.
Unfortunately, hybrid cloud offerings that combine the products and services of several providers raise a number of new concerns. Who is responsible for service quality? What service levels are offered in each cloud? Are the service levels compatible, believable and enforceable? What remedies are available if something goes wrong? The bad news is that no single company—including yours—has full visibility to data availability and latency across the hybrid cloud.
Getting Hybrid Cloud Storage Right
A well designed, single vendor solution can overcome each of these issues. By giving one vendor end-to-end insight and control of service availability and quality, there is no finger pointing. Instead, CIOs get a single point of accountability.
At the same time, single vendor cloud storage solutions are far from common. This is, in part, because they must deliver all three major components of a hybrid cloud solution, including the public cloud, the private cloud and a cloud gateway/API which is responsible for providing transparent connectivity between the public and private storage clouds. Neovise currently knows of only one vendor capable of delivering a complete end-to-end hybrid cloud storage solution. While most players in the cloud storage space only have offerings within a single segment—public cloud, private cloud or cloud gateways—Nirvanix has a dedicated and proven offering for each segment.
Nirvanix CloudComplete™ is a flexible, end-to-end cloud storage portfolio with multiple deployment options—public, private and hybrid—all based on the same core cloud technology, and all managed as a single service. The CloudComplete portfolio consists of:
1. Nirvanix Public Cloud Storage—a fully managed public cloud offering with usage-based pricing, QoS guarantees, elasticity, and multi-level data and physical security. Known officially as the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network™, the company’s core cloud storage service consists of eight clustered storage nodes strategically placed throughout the world. A single namespace spans all the nodes, so you can upload data once and it’s available from anywhere. Nirvanix Public Cloud Storage is accessible through Nirvanix CloudNAS Gateways via a web services API. It’s also integrated as a cloud back-end for several popular enterprise applications such as Symantec NetBackup, CommVault and in the entertainment space for DAM provider Front Porch Digital. The monthly fee includes uploads, downloads and replication. Customers also avoid maintenance fees and refresh costs.
2. Nirvanix Private Cloud Storage—a private cloud offering using the same technology as found in the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network. Nirvanix cloud storage nodes are installed in the customer’s data centers to give them complete control. However, they are fully managed by Nirvanix and maintain the same pay-per-use pricing model as Nirvanix Public Cloud Storage.
3. Nirvanix Hybrid Cloud Storage—a hybrid solution that links on-premise Nirvanix cloud storage nodes to the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network. Nirvanix manages the end-to-end solution and users pay only for storage actually consumed.
Each element of the Nirvanix CloudComplete portfolio offers users the pay-as-you-go pricing model and elasticity promised by cloud services. Further, by managing both ends of the storage network, Nirvanix can make the commitments CIOs need for service quality and availability.
Neovise Perspective
Cloud storage has emerged as one of the most important topics within cloud computing. Any enterprise IT organization developing a cloud storage strategy must consider the role of hybrid cloud storage. Whether hybrid cloud storage is on the IT agenda this year or a couple years out, decisions made now will impact future hybrid cloud storage options. IT organizations should keep in mind that involving two, three or more vendors and service providers in the cloud storage value chain can introduce inconsistencies that impact service quality, performance and availability.
At the same time, there is no single vendor—for cloud storage or other technology domains—that meets all the needs of all IT organizations. If you are doing high performance computing (HPC) or running other applications that require sub-millisecond latency like OLTP, you’ll want to look at local high speed storage solutions like 3PAR or EMC VMax. If you’re doing CGI rendering and need extensive bandwidth for reads and writes, then an Isilon, NetApp/LSI or DataDirect Networks storage system is a likely fit. If you’re looking for backup and archival for tier 3 and 4 data, or are looking for regional or global content collaboration, then Nirvanix’s cloud solutions are far better solution than the headaches of tape and the never-ending data migration/maintenance/tech refresh cycle of traditional storage systems.
Another advantage of cloud storage services is that they never go through an end of life (EOL) phase like traditional storage systems do. Just think about the numbers of Symmetrixes and NetApp filers that have been killed off over the years, forcing customers to migrate their data to the next generation and then the next generation. With cloud storage services, once your data is uploaded to the cloud, the infrastructure is enhanced, refreshed and optimized over time and the customer never has to deal with it.
Another important factor for organizations planning to leverage cloud storage services is to ensure that they select the most capable service provider for their specific data sets. Companies who upload hundreds of terabytes or multiple petabytes to the cloud can’t quickly download that data and re-deploy it to other providers. Once a large amount of data is in the cloud, it’s likely to stay there for a considerable period of time, so choosing the right cloud storage service provider from the start is more critical than ever.
Many leading enterprise IT organizations have found Nirvanix does more than deliver seamless public, private and hybrid cloud storage solutions. For example, NBCUniversal scaled its digital archive from 40 terabytes to over two petabytes in just 12 months with Nirvanix. Nirvanix built a private cloud for Cerner Healthcare, who is reselling it as a public cloud service to thousands of healthcare organizations. IBM is also taking Nirvanix public cloud storage technology and integrating it in its overall cloud services stack at the software level. Cisco and VMware are leveraging Nirvanix’s cloud for global data collaboration. World-class companies like these are choosing Nirvanix in part because of the unique service mix it offers.
Neovise has previously identified a number of Nirvanix cloud storage attributes that make the company a top provider of enterprise cloud storage solutions. These include:
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- 24×7 enterprise-class support
- All-in-one pricing, so you don’t need to worry about upload / download costs
- Usage-based pricing—only pay for usable storage with no charge for RAID overhead and no charge for meta data storage
- Data consistency—uniquely providing consistent storage across multiple locations
- Global namespace—upload once access anywhere
- Unlimited file sizes—ideal for large unstructured content
- A self-healing cloud—continuous data integrity checks with automatic repairs
- Network optimization and strong SLAs
- No maintenance fees, no technology refreshes
- Cloud gateway with end-to-end network visibility
- Security auditors allowed on premises; military-level security in place
- With this foundation—along with an extremely defensible position in hybrid cloud storage—Nirvanix is poised to continue its success in enterprise cloud storage. Nirvanix should be on a very short list of contenders for any enterprise IT organization considering cloud storage.
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