This offer really highlights the potential cloud storage has to help companies or local governments get fast and easy access to disaster recovery capabilities they could never afford in the past.  No hardware to buy, just download the software, map the drives and start a copy process.  Robocopy is free and you already have it, so no investment there.  And I’ve used the Nasuni software – I am certainly no system administrator but I was able to figure out how to add files and create snapshot copies, as well as restore from snaps, pretty quickly.  And because the environment is virtual – getting up and running in the event of an actual disaster can be done by spinning up a virtual machine from anywhere, provided you have the proper credentials.

This offer gave me one of those head shaking moments where I sit back and think about just how far technology has advanced in these recent few years – think about what it would have taken just 3 or 4 years ago to create a DR site and actually get back up and running in the event of a disaster - the remote site, hardware (servers and storage), advanced storage arrays capable of creating remote mirrors or host-based replication software, the software licenses and management overhead.  The cost and complexity of creating that type of environment is far beyond what many small to mid-sized companies could afford, never mind what state and local government budgets can pay for.  The cloud changes everything, this can all be bought as a service, in a shared model to lower administrative and capital costs, with near perfect economics (100% utilization).

Other vendors can learn from this example.  Aside from the obvious user benefits, this offer is also a good example of innovative marketing, presenting an offer that can really make a business impact to help users with true business issues – disaster preparedness and, if needed, recovery.  Steve blogged a while back about how technology marketeers are promoting cloud everything without tying solutions to business needs and items that users actually create a budget line item for.  This Nasuni offer is a great example of someone hitting the mark.

You can read Terri’s other blog entries at IT Depends.

Overview

Merely uttering the phrase “data migration” can strike fear into the hearts of IT administrators. Migrations are often lengthy and painful processes; they are also a necessary evil that supports business initiatives like outsourcing, data center moves, and cloud computing.

ESG recently conducted a survey of 515 senior IT professionals concerning their organizations’ data center plans and priorities for 2010 and beyond. [1] Among other findings, ESG uncovered that one in three companies are aggressively consolidating their data centers: more than one-third (35%) of respondents currently have data center reduction or consolidation activities underway. Of that group, enterprise-class organizations are more likely than midmarket firms to either be in the process of reducing or consolidating data center space.  In fact, data center consolidation ranks as the third most important overall IT initiative over the next 12-18 months for enterprise-class firms.

The same survey found that 20% of respondents plan to increase use of IT outsourcing as a cost containment strategy and 17% plan to increase use of cloud computing services as an alternative to in-house applications and/or infrastructure. Whether it’s data center moves, outsourcing, or subscribing to cloud services, all of these initiatives often have one thing in common: they depend on a successful migration to get new operations up and running.

A number of issues must be taken into consideration when planning a large scale data migration:

• Time. How long the migration takes will vary extensively based on the approach. With some methods, users also need to consider whether any additional time will be required to roll forward changes that happen between when a data copy happens and when it is up and running at the new site.
• Data availability. Some methods can require extensive downtime, during which data cannot be accessed.
• The cost of bandwidth. Depending on the amount of data and distance to the new site, implementations can become prohibitively expensive: the greater the distance or larger the data set, the more costs incurred.
• Portability between service providers. This concern is especially valid when leveraging cloud services, which may require programming to proprietary APIs to access data.
• Data reduction/transport optimization. Users need to understand the available options that reduce the overall amount of data that needs to be migrated, which can reduce both costs (media or bandwidth) and time to complete the migration.
• Security. Each method comes with associated risks; users must be able to ensure data is secure while in transit.

Options for Large Scale Data Migrations

Options for moving a large amount of data en masse from one location to another are very limited.

Backup and Restore

Data is backed up from one system and then restored on another. The process takes applications down, is typically slow, and consumes significant server resources.  With frequent delays, it is not at all unusual for a user to get only some percentage of the way through (and whether that is 1% or 99% makes no difference), exceed the operational window, and then have to start all over again. Just about the only good news is that backup operations sometimes have their own network (although that can be an expensive proposition), so network clogging can be avoided.

The biggest challenge with tape backup is that a user doesn’t really know whether a job succeeded or failed until it is complete. One bad tape renders a backup useless—the process needs to be restarted.  Restores from tape can also be lengthy and time consuming processes.  Data reduction is available through deduplication software, which is becoming ubiquitous in the backup process, but extra time may need to be added to re-inflate the data upon restore if required.  Security can be attained through encryption.

Copy to and Ship a Disk Subsystem

Users do have the option of loading the data onto a subsystem and shipping it to the new or remote site. The process is similar to regular backup in many respects, but it is also faster than backup and restore since disk-to-disk copy is faster than disk-to-tape and once the system is at the new site, it just needs to be powered up—there is no need to wait for tape restores at the remote or new site.  Encryption technology is available to secure the data.

This process is also risky: disks could be damaged or lost, which could cause data loss or corruption that may not be immediately evident.  Depending on distance, shipping time needs to be factored in, as well as data scrubbing and integrity checking, which could take a long time depending on the size of the data sets involved.

Network Copy

In this scenario, the server or storage array is called in to copy data across the network. Depending on the available network bandwidth, the amount of data, and the distance, this can be an expensive and lengthy process.  Data is sometimes inaccessible during the copy or access is slowed significantly due to resource contention. Since migration can consume significant network resources and other applications can be affected as well, the transfer should happen during off-peak hours. The upside is that users don’t have to worry about tapes or disks getting lost or damaged and risk of data loss is virtually nonexistent as writes are acknowledged at the remote site.  The main downsides of network copy are time, security, and bandwidth costs, all of which can be mitigated by leveraging WAN optimization technology.

Enter WAN Optimization

WAN optimization technologies let companies do more with less, enabling them to transfer more data over a smaller network connection. Such efficiency could deliver significant improvements in both existing and new disaster recovery environments. WAN optimization leverages a host of technologies like protocol optimization, encryption, deduplication, and compression, which combine to provide consistent and secure high performance connectivity over the WAN.  Additionally, policy-based quality of service (QoS) and load balancing guarantee that specific applications can be given priority for available bandwidth, minimizing the impact of the migration on other network traffic.

Leveraging WAN optimization for data migration is:

• Faster and more efficient. Data reduction technologies like compression and deduplication mean less data needs to be transferred, allowing the process to finish sooner. More efficient data transfer also means more data can be moved in smaller windows.
• Safer than shipping a disk subsystem or tapes. There is no physical piece of equipment containing data being shipped from place to place.
• Cost effective. Users can push more data over a smaller network connection, minimizing network costs.  WAN optimization solutions can improve network traffic management and efficiency, which could reduce total network consumption needs.
• Secure. WAN optimization technologies provide secure communications by encrypting data in flight and authenticating users accessing applications and data. It can also help reduce the load on back-end servers by offloading processor-intensive security operations for SSL/TLS and network encryption.
• Less disruptive than backup or network copy. Leveraging technologies like load balancing and policy-based QoS, critical applications can receive priority bandwidth allocation to avoid disruption by the migration during the day—the migration can then take priority during slower network periods, optimizing available bandwidth to meet business needs. Additionally, protocol optimization is used to reduce the impact of chatty protocols, streamlining communication between sites.

WAN optimization technologies with multi-Gbps throughput offering deduplication, compression, and high availability configurations can create efficiencies that enable the use of standard service provider networks.  This could potentially save millions in capital and operating costs that would have been spent relocating a data center due to insufficient network connectivity. At the very least, there is the potential to save tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in reduced network costs between sites.

The Bigger Truth

Migrations are migrations. The driving force behind a migration is ultimately not important: the challenges associated with migrating data to the cloud are not all that different from the challenges many enterprises have already faced with data center moves and consolidation. There are a number of ways to tackle the challenge.  Trade-offs will need to be made regarding cost, speed, and risk.  Shipping equipment around can be risky from a security standpoint and restoring from tape can be a long and laborious process that does not guarantee success. Moving data across the network can take some risk out of the equation and has a much better success rate, but it can also be time consuming and expensive without technology to give it a boost.  WAN optimization provides that boost.  It is already a proven technology and has been used broadly for data center consolidation, remote office application acceleration, and backup/disaster recovery initiatives.  WAN optimization technology can help reduce the pain of migrations so they are completed faster and cost less.  Using WAN optimization, users can finish migrations faster and return to productivity sooner.

I learned much more about Solaris and the SPARC processor roadmap than any human should be subjected to, but it was still worth the trip.  The Sun and STK guys seem really happy to “not be Sun” anymore and be a part of one of the largest technology companies in the world.  They have funding, are hiring, and all the questions about viability are gone.  They have over 300,000 Oracle customers now that are all Sun storage prospects, and a salesforce larger than they could ever have dreamed at Sun.  The storage guys, both disk and tape, seemed like they had a weight lifted off their shoulders.  They were open and talkative about the storage portfolio and where it’s headed, openly sharing product development roadmaps (under NDA, of course) with the analyst community.

These guys have a really good story to tell.  They have the apps, database, server, switches (data center fabric only, Infiniband, not going after Cisco any time soon) and storage.  They have a real converged computing story.  Exadata is pretty impressive, and the management team we saw over the past 2 days was very impressive.

I guess, if I had to net it all out, I’d sum it up as saying these two days certainly took away any doubt I had about Oracle’s commitment to the Sun storage portfolio.

Read Terri’s other blog entries at IT Depends.

Storage Environments Under Pressure

With IT under constant pressure to find ways to reduce cost, taking a long hard look at the storage environment makes sense. And so today, more than ever, IT is turning to the storage environment, investing in new technology with a clear focus on reducing operational costs.

Managing data growth was cited as a top priority by one quarter of those IT managers surveyed in ESG’s 2010 spending intentions survey, putting it among the top five priorities for IT managers and only slightly behind improving security, backup, and network infrastructure.[1]

Business as usual in the storage environment is no longer acceptable; IT is starting to collapse under the weight of the sheer amount of data it has to store.  “Spreadsheet management systems” cannot track what data lives on which LUNs when there are tens or hundreds of thousands of LUNs in the networked storage environment. Separate storage growth forecasts based on block and file protocols are not useful when, at the end of the day, all anyone wants is storage capacity to use when and where they need it.  What’s more, standalone silos with sub-50% utilization rates create too much waste in terms of management, floor space, and power and cooling.

Server virtualization is driving more complexity in the storage environment—disk LUNs need to be mapped to virtual machines and users need to carefully monitor how many virtual systems are sharing a single LUN if they are to avoid performance bottlenecks.

It is incumbent on storage vendors to develop simpler, more flexible storage systems; to remove the complexity of traditional disk/LUN/volume performance management and tuning; to provide protocol agnostic storage systems that provide a single storage pool that can be leveraged in multiple ways; to offer tiers or pools of storage with differing price/performance/availability characteristics to meet varying application support requirements (and a way to migrate between the pools); and to simplify storage management by automating low level tasks like provisioning and performance tuning.

The shift is starting to happen.  ESG is encountering more and more storage companies with a vision for creating simplicity at scale that meets many of the above requirements.  It will be a while before vendors meet all of the requirements for creating a mature, services-oriented storage environment, but the move is afoot and it seems to be particularly driven by scale-out storage vendors.

The Emergence of Scale-Out Storage

Scale-out 1.0

Scale-out storage really started in the NAS space—users needed systems that could support the massive throughput requirements of high performance computing (HPC) and media and entertainment. More recently, adoption is occurring in medical and geographic imaging applications. Scale-out NAS systems can independently scale throughput and capacity by adding nodes that work in parallel to support throughput requirements and are managed within a single namespace as a single system image.

There are inherent benefits in scale-out platforms that give a path to reduction in operational costs.  They can typically scale into the multi-petabyte range under a single system image, providing an ideal platform for consolidation.  They help IT reduce management costs and footprint, which reduces floor space and power and cooling costs.  And consolidation onto a shared resource results in much higher utilization rates, so users get more bang for their storage buck.[2]

Scale-out systems are seeing more and more enterprise interest as a platform that enables users to consolidate storage and contain costs.  In fact, ESG found 75% of the IT managers surveyed in late 2008 were either planning to deploy or investigating scale-out NAS.[3]

Scale-out NAS offers a number of benefits, but it has shortcomings as well—typically in three key areas:

• Scale-out storage has its roots in vertical markets that require high bandwidth throughput or fast parallel throughput for very large files, like those found in high performance computing and media and entertainment, so they are not designed for the more IO-intensive environments of traditional general purpose NAS.
• Those verticals where scale-out storage systems are used in line-of-business applications have not had requirements for enterprise-class features, like snapshot, remote replication, automated data tiering, and multiprotocol support found in today’s data centers; they’ve typically just been NAS, so many scale-out systems lag behind traditional scale-up systems in functionality such as multiprotocol support and synchronous remote mirroring.
• Some systems can be complex—after all, it’s not easy to build a true scale-out storage cluster that manages cache coherency, load balancing, autotuning, and tiered storage.  It is difficult to make scale-out truly simple to manage.

To truly meet enterprise needs, these systems must mature, vendors need to deliver “scale-out 2.0” systems, and we are indeed starting to see some solutions emerge.

The Rise of Scale-Out 2.0

Today, we’re seeing advances in scale-out platforms that bring functionality and ease of use directly in line with enterprise IT environments—scale-out 2.0 systems are basically a mashup of enterprise unified storage functionality and scale-out architecture.  These systems are protocol-agnostic and support consolidation efforts for both block and file data, tiering across nodes with different price/performance profiles, and pooled storage that allows IT to manage storage as a shared IT resource along with features such as remote replication, thin provisioning, and snapshot.  We’ve also seen advances in ease of use and automation that enable IT to truly create a dynamic, responsive storage infrastructure with minimal administrative overhead.

Scale-out 2.0 platforms will deliver the benefits of traditional enterprise-class storage systems and the efficiency and scalability of scale-out 1.0. These systems will:

• Provide secure, multitenant storage pools with varying price/performance/availability profiles.
• Provide a flexible platform that supports application virtualization and aggregation.
• Scale performance by adding processors or drives to pools as needed.
• Scale from terabytes to exabytes, growing with user requirements instead of ahead of them, optimizing the cost equation.
• Scale dynamically, always on, in any direction.
• Be protocol-agnostic, supporting multiple data access protocols and unifying the storage environment.
• Virtualize the storage environment in such a way that users have an always-on architecture that provides data access in the event of everything from a component outage to a lease rollover.
• Support enterprise-class storage features that are quickly becoming jacks-or-better requirements, such as thin provisioning, deduplication, read-only snaps, and synchronous remote copy.

What does this mean for IT?  These scale-out 2.0 platforms provide the ability to deploy a dynamic storage infrastructure that is flexible and grows with its users, and that supports the transition from lots of fixed, stovepiped storage systems to a shared, services-oriented information storage infrastructure. In this new infrastructure, capacity can be quickly provisioned, shared, managed with fewer resources to give IT levels of agility in the storage infrastructure and support new heights of storage scalability, efficiency, and agility.  That’s scale-out 2.0: a dynamic, unified storage architecture that provides simplicity at scale.

The Bigger Truth

Scale out 2.0 is largely aspirational right now.  A number of vendors have the roadmap in place to make this vision a reality.  ESG expects to see vendors start to fill in the scale-out 2.0 functionality checklist this year, with some completing it in the next 12 months. This rather utopian vision of a malleable shared storage environment is closer to reality than most users realize.

Humans can no longer manage storage the way it has traditionally been managed.  It is just too big, with millions of LUNs being required to get traditional storage systems to petabyte scale; there are just too many elements to manage and there is just too much inefficiency in traditional storage architectures.  This inefficiency is driving users to look at new ways of doing things that are more efficient and flexible, to make IT a business enabler rather than an inhibitor.  It is driving discussion around cloud services to reduce costs and the creation of internal IT resource clouds and service catalogs to deliver IT-as-a-service.  Public cloud storage services are built on scale-out platforms, but many don’t offer enterprise features.  ESG expects to see more and more cloud service providers and enterprise IT organizations embracing scale-out 2.0 platforms over time as they prove to deliver simplicity and flexibility at scale.

[2] For more information, see ESG Brief, Scale-Out Storage, June 2010.

[3] Source: ESG Research Report, 2008 Enterprise Storage Systems Survey, November 2008.

via Pogoplug: Your own personal $129 cloud – Jun. 25, 2010.

via ParaScale Unveils Cloud-Scale Data Protection and Security For “Big Data” | WHIR Web Hosting Industry News”.

Cloud storage holds tremendous promise as a way for IT to significantly drive down both CAPEX and OPEX, but the reality is that cloud storage is new and unproven. Most cloud storage service provider solutions on the market today offer basic storage capacity and data protection, such as RAID or mirroring, but we continue to hear user concerns about data availability, security, and performance as well as regulatory compliance. That’s exactly what TwinStrata addresses–and why we’ll continue to see cloud storage enablement platforms come to market this year. This is an emerging market category that encompasses companies that address the inhibitors surrounding enterprise IT adoption of cloud storage: data availability is addressed with read-only snapshots; security with encryption; and performance and latency with a local cache and algorithms to ensure active data is stored locally. To address proprietary interfaces, cloud storage enablement vendors write to the service provider’s proprietary API and present a standards-based interface back to the business while excessive bandwidth costs are addressed through data reduction technology.

TwinStrata has not yet announced the formal product set–but the vision, strategy and intelligent storage cloud ecosystem. There will be more to come. The team, Nicos Vekiarides (CEO), John Bates (CTO), and Rob Infantino (Consultant and Advisor) comes from a storage virtualization background (Incipient & StorageApps/HP). That makes sense–essentially, cloud storage enablement blurs the lines between local and cloud-based storage, creating a virtual (and bottomless) storage pool wrapped with policies for data protection, performance, and placement. To make an end-to-end intelligent storage cloud a reality requires a strong ecosystem, and it appears TwinStrata has a good head start there with a list of partners that includes cloud storage technology, service, and solution providers.

This is a timely launch. Cloud storage enablement solutions like those from TwinStrata, Nasuni (just went GA today), and Cirtas (as yet not officially launched) will help dispel user concerns and propel cloud storage into commercial IT.

Overview

Bycast is a pretty well kept secret, primarily known as a DICOM-compliant long term digital medical archive solution provider.  Its software is primarily sold through HP as HP Medical Archive Solution (MAS) and IBM as IBM Grid Medical Archive Solution (GMAS).   It is a less well known fact that Bycast’s software also powers a well known Tier 1 online cloud-based archive solution.

This acquisition is certainly strategic for NetApp with a solid entry in object-based, scalable, policy-based storage management.  It is complementary to the existing NetApp storage portfolio since it sits as an application above the storage systems and virtualizes the storage environment.  Key to the Bycast StorageGRID offering is its ability to manage geographically dispersed storage clusters and set policies for how and where data is stored, including storage tiering across everything from Tier 1 big iron platforms all the way across the price/performance spectrum to tape.  It has encryption, authentication, and security features designed to be used in stringent HIPAA-compliant environments, which could also translate to broader cloud-based compliance solutions over time.

Bycast’s StorageGRID software provides unified management of a diverse, heterogeneous storage pool in which users can decide—based on policy—which types of storage fit the bill for different data types. StorageGRID is a highly available scale-out platform that can be implemented in a single facility or geographically distributed, but is still managed from a single interface with a global namespace. Thanks to its grid-based implementation, the associated storage ecosystem has no practical limit for scalability. Thanks to the global namespace, users are insulated from the challenge of accessing data as it is moved across tiers of storage—it is all done under the covers, completely transparent to users.

The platform is well suited to digital media and not just for medical archiving. It is also suitable for Web 2.0 applications, life sciences, earth sciences, etc.—anything that generates a lot of large files. The issue for Bycast has been to expand outside of medical archiving in a very challenging economy; one that is go-to-market, not product, focused. For a small company like Bycast, opening new markets requires massive investment and focus.  It is not a cheap undertaking, no matter how compelling the solution. The company is fairly small and, as such, had to fight to be heard and to parlay the vertical success it has had in medical archiving into horizontal success in the general archive market.  With NetApp, Bycast now has an entrée into enterprise accounts that it would not have achieved on its own.

Why Bycast is Important to NetApp

Cloud storage holds tremendous promise as a way to manage burgeoning enterprise data.  Any device connected to the Internet now has the potential to create, access, move, find, manipulate, delete, store, or manage online digital content.  In this era, everyone—via most every conceivable device—can be connected to everyone else, eliminating geographic boundaries that previously existed.  Corporations will be responsible for creating the policies and methods that ensure the proper use and protection of digital assets.

That’s where object-based storage comes in.  The massive amounts of information that users are now, or will be in coming years, struggling to manage requires a new storage paradigm, one that is largely policy-based.  IT will ultimately fold if it continues with “business as usual”—throwing capacity at performance problems, deploying stovepiped storage systems, and relying on the long laundry list of manual tasks that make up a storage administrator’s job. Object-based systems store data in a variably-sized “container” that holds both data and metadata. Object storage systems bring the ability to wrap objects with advanced metadata that can then be leveraged for policy-based automated storage tasks: data migration, tiering, retention, disposition, security, and protection.  Put another way, the metadata can be leveraged to determine how and where data is stored, for how long, and who can access it.  For businesses, that means data can automatically be stored on the most cost effective media and only as long as required, keeping data growth and management somewhat in check.  That’s what Bycast brings to the table.

It is important to note, however, that most object-based systems require application integration or modification to operate in today’s IT environments; they can’t just be dropped like standards-based NAS systems.  Bycast StorageGRID does not have that challenge; it supports both DICOM for medical archiving and NFS, which is how the vast majority of its installations use it.  Therefore, StorageGRID has not seen an issue there and does not face the challenges with proprietary APIs that has slowed broad adoption of object-based systems.

Positioning

NetApp will continue to offer StorageGRID as a software-only solution for the time being.  Relative to NetApp’s GX clustered storage offering, expect NetApp to position Bycast StorageGRID:

• For massive scale as a distributed object repository.
• For management of tens of petabytes of capacity and billions of objects.
• For geographically dispersed clusters, suitable for content distribution.
• As an automated, policy-based solution with the ability to set policies that define how data is treated (migrating data across platforms or geographies according to policies, defining how many copies of data are stored where, setting policies for retention and disposition of data).

NetApp will likely continue to position its GX-based scale-out cluster for single site parallel data services designed to support massive throughput applications and scale in the hundreds of terabyte to single digit petabyte range.

On the surface, this move could be seen as counter to NetApp’s unified storage strategy that offers one set of management tools, policies, and procedures across everything in its line.  But it is important to remember that StorageGRID has a robust policy engine that addresses areas NetApp does not with SANscreen and OnTAP—authentication, security, retention, and disposition—and as a software layer, these capabilities can be stretched across the entire product line in a unified fashion.  NetApp will need to work to bring these products together, but on the surface, they are more complementary than competitive.

The Bigger Truth

Lots of hats have been thrown into the object storage ring, all targeted at providing large-scale cloud solutions both public and private.  EMC was one of the first with Centera, followed by Atmos.  Recently, Dell announced a scale-out object storage platform it will target towards health care, file and e-mail archiving, e-discovery, and content management that it will ship in the first half of this year with a cloud system to follow.  Smaller companies like Panasas and Cleversafe are slowly getting traction.  IBM is betting on scale-out file services (via SONAS and SOFS), but it would not surprise anyone to see IBM (or HP, for that matter) come out with an object-based solution over time.  Object systems enable the massive scale that could ultimately propel cloud storage—it is just too difficult to manage systems at tens to hundreds of petabytes of data.  Some scale-out systems, like Isilon or even NetApp GX-based solutions, can scale into hundreds of terabytes and tens of petabytes, but when it comes to enabling advanced policy-based automation and geographically dispersed clusters, going the object route may just be what it takes to get there thanks to rich metadata and flat global namespace.

Bycast has a solid product, but the company’s size was an inhibitor to adoption; with NetApp offering the product, that challenge goes away.  There is a ton of potential in this deal, but NetApp does not have a strong track record when it comes to integrating acquired technology.  NetApp could learn a thing or two from EMC and Cisco here—don’t fix what isn’t broken (the product), concentrate on what is (the go-to-market channels).  Incent the channel to carry Bycast StorageGRID as a defensive deal against EMC Atmos and invest in growing the StorageGRID business as a complementary offering while working on integrating the underlying management components.  It’s much easier said than done, but if NetApp applies lessons learned from past acquisitions, it has an opportunity to take a giant step forward in its push towards becoming a major cloud storage infrastructure supplier.

via NetApp continues bringing unified storage to customers.

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.