Overview

For IT shops, focus on finding ways to streamline the business and reduce operational costs has never been higher.  In fact, ESG recently surveyed over 500 senior North American and Western European IT professionals familiar with their organization’s 2010 IT spending plans, asking them to identify the most important criteria for justifying IT spending throughout 2010 and into 2011.[1] Survey participants cited reducing operational cost as the top justification criteria. This is an interesting trend: in surveys conducted before 2009, reducing capital cost was right at the top of the list, but in 2009 and 2010, we see IT looking to simplify operations and reduce operational expenses—something cloud storage can certainly help with.

Cloud storage can help IT with its cost reduction efforts in a number of ways; simplifying the overall storage environment, reducing (significantly) storage capital expenses, and outsourcing the more mundane storage management tasks are just a few.  ESG often hears about storage environments that have become so incredibly complex that users often leverage spreadsheets to map application data and connect it to storage devices.  As the environment changes—say, new capacity comes online or storage systems are updated or replaced—the spreadsheets need to be updated to ensure important data is protected and backed up.  This can get messy and complex quickly, consuming a great deal of time and effort. 

Because of this complexity, systems frequently experience poor utilization—oftentimes under 50%.  That’s a lot of floor space, power, cooling, and management cycles for capacity that is not directly supporting the business.

Just simplifying the storage environment by leveraging cloud storage can go a long way towards addressing these challenges and reducing overall operational costs.

• Cloud storage service providers don’t have legacy storage architectures to deal with—they aren’t managing a bunch of stovepiped storage systems and mapping data layouts in a spreadsheet.  The cloud storage service provider’s architecture is built on a foundation designed for massive scale and multi-tenancy—service providers can manage the infrastructure efficiently thanks to economies of scale and scale-out virtualized storage platforms, keeping its overall operational costs much lower than a typical IT shop and enabling them to pass the savings on to subscribers.
• The subscriber’s economics are near perfect. They only pay for the capacity that is actually used.  In fact, for new applications or for a startup, leveraging cloud storage services can really cut down on the overall upfront capital investment required for IT infrastructure since the infrastructure is housed in the cloud service provider’s data center.

There have been some user concerns around adopting cloud storage. Users face many of the same issues in a cloud storage environment that they do with in-house storage, including security, data availability, protection, and performance.  Cloud storage service providers only offer raw capacity and basic data protection (in the form of mirrored data or other types of RAID protection), and don’t typically address these issues.  An intermediary solution is needed to bridge the gaps in cloud storage service provider offerings.

Enter Nasuni Cloud Filer

The Nasuni filer is a cloud storage gateway that connects a user’s current IT environment with a cloud storage service provider’s, allowing users to leverage cloud storage services to store Windows-based file data through a standard CIFS-based interface.  The filer fills the gaps in the cloud providers’ offerings, delivering the performance, advanced security, and availability users expect from higher end NAS solutions and the flexible, cost efficient, bottomless capacity of cloud storage. It works and appears to users just like any other CIFS filer with full Active Directory support, so it doesn’t require any specialized skills and fits into existing storage management best practices.  Deployed as a virtual machine, it does not require any specialized hardware.

Nasuni, with its filer cloud storage gateway, addresses top user concerns in some interesting ways.  It ensures:

• A user experience with remote storage on par with local performance.
• Data protection and availability, even in the event of a local site disaster.
• Data security.

The Nasuni gateway allows users to create a virtual file storage pool with unlimited flexibility to expand and contract capacity as necessary—users only pay for the actual capacity consumed on a monthly basis.  It eliminates the need to provision for peak needs, saving capital and operational costs across the board.

The Nasuni filer really addresses the spectrum of user concerns about moving to cloud storage.

• Performance: In most cases, users won’t even know that their data is stored offsite.  Nasuni leverages a unique caching algorithm to ensure that active data is stored in a local cache, providing local storage performance while relatively inactive data, typically bulk file data, is stored offsite at the cloud storage service provider.  For this offsite data, all metadata is cached.  In the event that a user needs to access a file that has been moved offsite, it is returned in chunks so users can access their data without waiting for the entire file to be returned to the local cache, speeding up time-to-access.
• Security: On the security front, Nasuni has end-to-end encryption using open PGP with AES-256 encoding.  Data is encrypted before it leaves the user site and is then sent over secure encrypted HTTP, providing two layers of security while in transit. Encryption keys reside with the subscriber, not the service provider, further ensuring secure offsite storage. The cloud service provider has no way to access user data.
• Data availability: Availability, another common user concern, is ensured through synchronous snapshots that capture the file system at user-defined periods of time.  The key value snapshots bring to the table is the ability to quickly find data that needs to be recovered and restore it from any point in time, basically eliminating the need to back up the filer. Users simply browse the snaps, find the file that needs to be restored, and click the “OK” button.
• Capacity reduction: Snaps are very efficient. Snapshots are deduplicated, with only changed or new data being captured, and compressed—both of which reduce the cloud capacity required and in turn reduce costs.
• Fast restores: One of the big challenges with storing backup copies of data in the cloud is that a restore of a full data set over the wire takes time, even if restoring from a snapshot copy.  Nasuni has some interesting technology to allow users to achieve a near-instant restore.  As mentioned previously, Nasuni caches all the metadata and returns files in chunks so users can begin to access data immediately.  Since users almost always need just a small portion of the file or file system restored quickly, they can be productive soon after the restore operation is triggered, minimizing downtime.
• Disaster resiliency: In the event of a local disaster, users can be up and running at a remote site with no new storage hardware required to access data stored using the Nasuni filer.  The filer is a virtual machine, so users just need to start a VM, download the Nasuni software and specific user credentials, and access their data.  Getting new encryption keys is not as easy if they are lost as there is quite a bit of verification required to ensure security, but compare that to standing up new storage on site, applying backups, and rolling forward from the last full backup and then across incremental backups— the difference in the time it takes to get back up and running is profound.

Leveraging the Nasuni filer and cloud storage services, users could actually find themselves with higher data protection and disaster resiliency levels than they could ever afford with onsite solutions while still paying less for primary storage.

The Bigger Truth

Technology—on both the networking and storage fronts—has advanced to the point that cloud storage is quickly becoming a viable alternative to augment local capacity.  Leveraging cloud storage eliminates all the mundane tasks that consume so many cycles, like mapping data sets on spreadsheets, performance tuning, planning storage layouts, setting RAID protection levels and stripe sizes, and zoning switches.  By shifting to cloud storage, most of that just goes away, freeing up IT staff to help the business rather than spend all their time firefighting and treading water.  That’s pretty powerful. Nasuni provides a bridge from the data center to the cloud, enabling seamless capacity expansion and provisioning as the business grows, so the IT infrastructure grows with the business.

The move to cloud storage is a journey that will happen over time.  For Windows-based file data, Nasuni provides a bridge between today’s midsized enterprise data centers and cloud storage service providers that allows IT shops to begin their journeys.  They can take small steps or go all in thanks to Nasuni’s gateway architecture—a virtual machine that offers a very low barrier to entry to the cloud and its immediate benefits.