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Posted by George Crump on August 19, 2009
Every week or so one major internet service or another goes down for a moment, Amazon S3, Google Apps, Twitter etc... As a result I get a few emails using this as proof that the cloud is not reliable for business storage. While I agree that various providers have to improve their uptime, this does not mean that the whole cloud needs to be thrown out.
Let's face it, if you store data in the cloud there are a hundred variables between you and your data and if any one of those variables decides to, well, be variable, then you may not be able to get to your data for a period of time. This does not mean that you can't use the cloud, it means that you can't put data that you are going to need immediate access to solely in the cloud.
What this does mean is using a hybrid model for cloud storage. As we demonstrate in our latest video "What is Hybrid Cloud Storage?" a hybrid cloud is an appliance that is placed on the customer's site to act as a intermediary storage location for data that is in route to the cloud. The appliance serves many purposes: translation from CIFS/NFS to more internet friendly protocols, local cache for rapid restores of last copy of a backup or archive and as a place to get to data that would otherwise be inaccessible due to some sort of connection issue.
The appliance can be sized typically to store as much data locally as you feel comfortable with, while simultaneously replicating that data to the cloud storage provider. We see small business versions of this today from companies like Dropbox, Soonr and others, which have local clients or agents that you load on your desktops/laptops making your personal system a hybrid appliance. These agents synchronize or archive data to their cloud storage. To some extent the cloud extensions that I wrote about in a previous entry makes the backup or archive application that hybrid appliance on your desktop.
As you expand, installing and managing clients becomes unwieldy and the need for a centralized appliance become obvious. Companies like Iron Mountain, Nirvanix, Axcient and others are well down the road to providing this sort of intelligence.
Comment by Goran Garevski on August 20, 2009 2:11 PM
A must functionality for this intelligent cloud client (appliance) should be to avoid service provider (or backend) lock-in, giving the appliance ability to manage and migrate data between multiple backend storage (including private cloud, or cache as you name it). This is why the appliance should be provided by an ISV rather than the cloud service provider.
By the way???isn't it more straightforward to use the term ???hybrid cloud??? when referring to the complete infrastructure (the appliance, private and public/online cloud) rather than just the appliance itself?
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Comment by Sajai Krishnan, CEO, ParaScale on August 26, 2009 9:01 PM
George
Goran's point about using "hybrid" to describe a "gateway appliance" just confuses customers. More commonly I have seen "hybrid" reference a combo public-private cloud implementation. I suspect you have used this terminology yourself in the past :-).
IMO a gateway appliance is really only good for SMBs - thats the market that Axcient, eGnyte etc serve. A gateway would be a chokepoint for any enterprise grade access to the cloud. An implementation that does not feel like a toy in the enterprise is a public-private implementation over some fast network. By working with a ParaScale internal cloud, linked to a service-provider hosted ParaScale public cloud, it is possible to do this. With an industry standard REST API (not yet another vendor proprietary REST API http://blog.parascale.com/?p=220) one could do this very easily from an internal cloud to anyone's public cloud. This would be ideal for the customer.
ParaScale would love to see a standard around a REST API and then maybe some gateway appliance vendor will create a business around a generic cloud gateway for SMBs. Today using the standard WebDAV protocol it is possible to do this. However, while WebDAV is an old standard and a few vendors support it (including ParaScale, EMC, Sun, IBM etc) it certainly is not a widespread standard.
Hope that analysts like you, and customers will continue to push for a standard REST API versus a proliferation of gateway boxes in the enterprise. Cloud is about managing scale efficiently - proliferating point boxes seems anti-cloud IMHO.
Sajai, CEO, ParaScale
http://www.parascale.com/
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