Melbourne, Florida -- Cloud storage is often thought of as a secondary storage area, a place to hold backups or archives, but for an increasing number of organizations it is also becoming a primary storage area. The move to primary cloud storage though does not mean that the organization can just fire the storage administrator. While primary cloud storage does simplify some aspects of storage, it still requires management.
There are three types of primary cloud storage that I see emerging and all of them use some sort of hybrid approach so that most active data is available locally on an appliance and then sub-sections of that data are only available via the cloud. It is the job of the cloud storage software to be as accurate as possible in making sure that the data you want is locally available. The three use-cases for primary cloud storage are file sharing, collaboration enablement, and semi-structured environments like email.
Filter through the cloud computing hype
Develop a realistic plan to incorporate SaaS.
One of the key reasons that primary cloud storage will still need storage administration is that it will require a local infrastructure that connects servers to that hybrid appliance. Most of these hybrid appliances connect to the local servers via an IP based protocol, typically using CIFS, NFS, or iSCSI, says Brian McCarthy CEO of Cloud Caboodle and well known Storage veteran. This connection is a storage network and will need to be managed just like any other. The storage administrator will need to make sure that the network can deliver storage to the users and servers as fast as those applications can demand it. In fact to some degree there may be even more pressure on the network even though the bulk of the storage is remote.
As we discussed in our webcast Adding NAS to Your SAN By Leveraging Cloud thanks to the intelligence of these hybrid appliances the local cache can be relatively small and organizations can cost effectively leverage solid state technology as the local storage area. That means that locally accessed data will actually be delivered faster and as a result the network needs to perform better to be able to match that performance. Local network as well as WAN optimization skills will be an important requirement for the cloud storage administrator.
The other aspect of primary cloud storage is that storage management becomes more important, especially as you are paying by the GB per month for the capacity used. While the expansion of storage is simplified, automatic in most cases, with primary cloud storage you still want to be able to control growth. Though a few providers offer the ability to tier backend storage at the providers data center, most do not simply because they have not invested in the integration of an alternative tier like tape. There is typically only one tier and it is often inexpensive disk with a lot of redundancy. As we discussed in our article LTFS Role In The Cloud cloud providers may want to expand their use of tape beyond backup and start looking at tape as an alternative storage area.
For now, in most cases, you only have one tier, other than the local hybrid tier which is really more of a cache, available to you when using primary cloud storage. With only one tier available to you may want to look for alternative ways to save money as data becomes less important. Moving data management beyond simple tiering requires that you look at data cost reductions in new ways:
-- What data is extraneous and really should be deleted
-- What data is important but does not need to be stored in multiple regions
-- What data can be easily recreated, meaning it does not need to be stored at all
-- What data should be shifted to a slower, less expensive cloud storage provider, essentially tiering between providers.
These are all aspects of the new era of storage management. Primary cloud storage brings greater emphasis to managing the cost of capacity. That will have greater importance in the cloud era, and how you achieve maximum cost efficiencies will be a key responsibility of the cloud storage administrator.
For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111 or click www.cloudcaboodle.com
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage
Miami Florida -- The 2011 Atlantic hurricane season will be very active with five major hurricanes of Category 3 or stronger, according to the latest forecast from Philip Klotzbach and William Gray of the Colorado State University Department of Atmospheric Science. The probability of U.S. major hurricane landfall is estimated to be about 140 percent of the long-period average, said the scientists, who issue several seasonal hurricane forecasts each year to satisfy the curiosity of the general public and to bring attention to the hurricane problem. Information obtained through March 2011 indicates that the 2011 Atlantic hurricane season will have significantly more activity than the average 1950-2000 season, they said April 6.
Starting June 1st., hurricanes will begin sweeping through the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean and will begin to capture headlines. Swimmers and surfers are at risk due to huge waves, but these massive storms pose a significant threat to businesses too. Once they move inland, hurricanes can damage or even destroy offices and company data centers, and potentially cost enterprises tens of thousands of dollars or more. Disaster recovery planning is critical for any enterprise, but for companies in hurricane-vulnerable areas, this is especially true right now.
That is why Cloud Caboodle has decided to offer the free use of a cloud gateway technology, the Nasuni Filer, to companies in hurricane-prone regions for the duration of the storm season. There are a number of offsite data backup solutions on the market today - most enterprises resort to disk, tape, or some combination of the two, says Brian McCarthy the CEO of Cloud Caboodle and well known speaker of the subject of disaster recovery. But the reality is that when you evaluate these solutions in terms of downtime, data integrity, cost, simplicity, and security, they fall short. Our SkySuite is an effective cloud gateway technology, on the other hand and can meet each of these critical standards, says McCarthy.
Speaking from experience hurricanes do level even the best of data centers, but if you were a Nasuni client, you would be able to access your file system in less than 15 minutes. Critical business documents could be recovered almost instantly, and it would all be done securely, simply, affordably and without the loss or corruption of data that is common with other solutions.
We want to help companies plan for disaster during this particularly dangerous season, we are offering the Nasuni Filer free to businesses in select cities throughout Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Lousiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas.
Our goal is to help as many businesses as possible get through this already intense hurricane season without losing critical business data. Nasuni customers quickly see the benefits of affordable, simple, and secure automatic offsite backup and disaster recovery.
For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111 or click www.cloudcaboodle.com
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage
Tampa, Florida -- It is an unfortunate fact that the cloud is still heavily overhyped to the point where a good deal of IT activity is devoted to convincing business decision makers that cloud computing is actually not some ephemeral science fiction story, but a legitimate way to augment and improve in-house computing capabilities.
This disconnect between hyperbole and reality has led many cloud implementations to fall short of expectations, usually as a consequence of cost savings that never materialize. Not incidentally, this focus on hand waving and cost reduction has also hurt the community of cloud vendors. Yet the story around cloud services is actually quite good.
Cloud storage, in particular, is well established and well on its way to being an important arrow in the enterprise IT quiver of solutions. In fact, this portion of the cloud market is estimated by some analysts to be in the $400 million range annually, according to Frost & Sullivan.
It is important to note that cloud storage solutions are not necessarily less expensive than simply implementing storage arrays in the data center, says Brian McCarthy, CEO of Cloud Caboodle and 30 year storage veteran. They do, however, confer a substantial amount of survivability to the business. In fact, cloud storage is more of an insurance policy than it is an alternative to reasonable levels of IT investment.
Cloud storage poised to become business enabler
Storage has generally followed the Moores Law dynamic of delivering double the density at half the cost every 18 months. This means that even in the most extreme levels of data growth, if an enterprise simply waits a bit, it can be assured of being able to meet its data storage needs at a reasonable price. Storage is not simply about the physical capability of storing bits, however. Storage is often the central enabler of a business: It contains customer records, financial records and the intellectual property of the company. Loss of any of this information could be damaging, if not terminally so.
So it is ironic that cloud storage is often justified strictly on the basis of cost reduction. Many CIOs and cloud storage providers themselves pitch cloud storage solutions as a way to reduce enterprise IT costs. This is true to a point. After all, it can appear to IT planners that it would be expensive to deploy the infrastructure necessary to maintain a complete backup image of all current and archived data. But it is likely, for the Moores Law reasons cited above, that the cost need not be substantially more than simply over-provisioning storage in the first place, says McCarthy of Cloud Caboodle.
In terms of an insurance policy, however, the cost of not effectively backing up critical data offsite can mean a catastrophic loss to the business. If cloud storage were configured and marketed in those terms, it would actually be priced quite a bit higher than it currently is.
Concerns arise about cloud storage solutions as business insurance
Looking at cloud storage as a business insurance policy is problematic, though, for several reasons.
First, cloud storage providers take a rather simplistic view of liability. While most service -level agreements (SLAs) provide for
damages in the event of data loss or corruption, in practice, the total amount of any penalties is insufficient to compensate for
the real cost of failure. In fact, in the world of cloud storage, liability is mostly intended as a deterrent to make sure the cloud
service provider doesn’t deliver bad service—a penalty that is intended to provide an incentive to take the proper precautionary
steps.
Closely aligned with this is the notion of securing data in the cloud. As several rather spectacular failures have demonstrated,
just because a cloud storage vendor says managed data is secure does not make it so. Cloud Caboodle has partnered with Nasuni
for NAS and StorSimple for iSCSI SAN in order to absolutely safeguard data, our enterprise solutions take this seriously by
encrypting all data both in-flight and stored outside the corporation. We also provide up to four independent images to ensure no
loss of critical data if one cloud is compromised as was the case with Amazon recently.
Second, as noted above, almost any cloud service is viewed generally, and by IT and cloud service providers, as a low-cost
alternative to having the enterprise perform the function itself. This places significant pressure on IT and the cloud provider to
collude in distorting both the price of the service as well as the value that is provided by adopting it.
Finally, in the past cloud storage solutions were not an exact replacement for enterprise storage arrays, until now. Both Nasuni
and StorSimple go to great lengths to keep hot data in tier 0 and 1 for enterprise performance. Once the data has become cold
it is move to the end of what is frequently a connection to the public Internet, cloud storage often has a much different latency
dynamic. In other words, storage and retrieval do not necessarily take place as quickly as they do for directly connected
storage. Cloud Caboodle with its 8 years of experience has learned best practices for designing out network congestion so that
does have an impact on retrieving data.
Positioning cloud storage solutions to the enterprise
Cloud Caboodle has found that it is important to let the client know up front that rather than pitching cloud storage solutions as a cheaper alternative to building additional dedicated storage, IT should consider cloud storage solutions as a flexible way to support operations and as an insurance policy that backstops conventional disaster planning. We have found viewed from this perspective, C-level management would likely expect and approve higher costs to support such contingency planning. Rather than being a zero-sum game where the pressure is to reduce costs as much as possible—even at the risk of reliability—cloud storage would become simply another component that guarantees corporate survivability in the case of unforeseen disasters.
The consequence of this new approach by IT is that Cloud Caboodle thinks in terms of bulletproof solutions that are truly survivable for our clients. In summary we providing data mirroring, encryption and real-time, active management to detect and prevent compromised or lost data. It also means marketing cloud storage solutions not as a cheap alternative to dedicated storage and archival, but as the insurance policy these solutions are, with a commensurate price.
For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111 or click www.cloudcaboodle.com
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage
Jacksonville, Florida -- Desert Schools Federal Credit Union slashed its IBM i server backup times by more than 90 percent and its X64 server backup times by about 80 percent as a result of the implementation of i365's EVault Plug-n-Protect backup and recovery appliances, the IT vendor announced last week. The Phoenix-based credit union made the move to the EVault disk- and cloud-based backup solution after it determined tape backups could no longer adequately protect its 400-server environment.
Desert Schools Federal Credit Union provides banking and financial services to about 370,000 Arizonans through more than 50 branches in Gila, Maricopa, and Pinal counties. With assets of about $3.2 billion, the non-profit organization is the 24th largest credit union in the country. It's been in business for more than 70 years.
Prior to adopting i365 EVault, the credit union used a combination of tape backup and third-party encryption technologies to protect about 12 TB of confidential financial data. This data was spread across 392 servers running IBM i, VMware, and Windows environments. However, the backup routines failed to meet the credit union's recovery time objective (RTO). This set the organization on a course of violating compliance requirements set forth by the National Credit Union Association, i365 said.
The solution recommended by Desert Schools IT solutions provider, Cloud Caboodle was to install the EVault Plug-n-Protect appliance, which i365 launched about two years ago. The Windows-based appliances feature SATA drives manufactured by i365s corporate parent, Seagate Technology. The appliances, which can house from 3 TB to 12 TB each of RAID 5-protected storage, work with locally installed EVault agents to back up data from target platforms. They also work with the EVault Cloud to provide a hybrid backup solution that includes off-site data protection.
Backup times fell dramatically following the EVault implementation. It previously took 37 hours to back up the credit unions core IBM i-based banking application, Fiserv Signature. Following the installation, it took three hours. Backup times for X64 systems dropped from 17 hours to about 3.5 hours, i365 said. Whats more, the move freed up the IT departments time by more than 25 hours a month.
We knew EVault was the best choice for Desert Schools, offering total reliability for data backup, native deduplication, AES encryption, delta-level replication, and bare metal recovery for all applications, Cloud Caboodles solutions architect Neil Scott stated.
For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111 or click www.cloudcaboodle.com
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage
To provide VMware certified hybrid cloud backup and disaster recovery offering
Miami, Florida -- Quest Software has entered into a new strategic initiative with StorSimple, a provider of hybrid cloud storage technology for VMware infrastructures, to provide a single VMware Ready certified hybrid cloud backup, restore and disaster recovery offering. The combination of Quest vRanger and the StorSimple Hybrid Cloud Storage Appliance will give vRanger users access to a VMware virtual machine backup-to-disk offering with automated cloud archiving. In addition, the combined offering will enable users to perform seamless, granular object-level or virtual machine-level restores directly from the cloud, the company said. Quest Software said that the StorSimple Hybrid Cloud Storage Appliance makes cloud storage services as accessible and secure as traditional storage, without adding complexity to the existing backup environment.
Further, the strategic initiative will provide vRanger users with a one-step backup with automatic offsite data protection, without the need for tapes or a complex local storage infrastructure. The offering also provides flexible and disaster recovery and, in the event of a site-wide disaster, allows vRanger users to employ StorSimples CloudSnap technology, along with vRangers manifest files, to restore virtual machines directly to another site, said the company. Quest Software data protection products vice-president John Maxwell said that todays exploding corporate data has organisations actively seeking cost-effective, dynamic cloud-based storage offerings that integrate seamlessly into their enterprise backup and recovery programs, but poor integration between the IT environment and the cloud provider often makes that a challenging proposition.
Quest is solving that challenge for users of vRanger by working with StorSimple to deliver access to an innovative technology that simplifies cloud storage by providing primary storage, archiving, data protection and disaster recovery in one simple offering, Maxwell said.
For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111 or click www.cloudcaboodle.com
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage