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ShareThe Storage Behind The Cloud
Posted by George Crump on May 4, 2009
The storage behind the Cloud matters. While many Cloud Services have service-level agreements (SLAs), the only thing that SLA is good for if your provider is down and can't return you to operations quickly is a lawsuit. Ask what these providers have in the back end for both their storage and recovery processes. Make sure they are using products that have a track record of being cost effective, redundant and reliable. You might be surprised at the answers.
For example, I was having lunch with the storage administrator of a local insurance company and we were talking about Cloud Services. His view was recently soured. One of the Cloud Services they were using had an outage, broke their SLA and the insurance company was without an important, not critical, service for almost two days. It turns out the provider of the service was running the application on internally installed RAID-5 and they had a double drive failure. Up until that point the storage administrator had never asked what was the storage behind the cloud. The only form of recovery for the provider was from tape, it took two days to order in new drives, install them in the area and recovery the application.
Comment by Anonymous on May 11, 2009 2:56 PM
Cloud was spawned from WWW. If you look into the archives of the internet - BBN out of Boston, not Al Gore, architeched it first with the founding principal as "reliability". The network couldn't go done. The RAID DP from Netapp is the most reliable RAID in the industry for Cloud services. It is the stoage behind Yahoo, Oracle and Lockheed Martin NIMBUS cloud . I work closely architecting Cloud solutions into Federal Gov. Netapp has all the features you mentioned. Please review RAID DP's powerful technology from Netapp.
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Comment by fcman on May 14, 2009 6:41 PM
This article was great! Especially the parts where you advise the cloud providers to get their collective stuff together. I think a lot of providers are trying to pull the wool over their customer's eyes as the build up revenue to build the infrastructure appropriately. As for the previous comments some errors shold be pointed out. BBN, nor Al Gore, invented the internet. DARPA did through commission. Netapp is not the greatest thing since sliced bread nor is RAID-DP, no software RAID is. Standard RAID types are not used by Netapp due to limitations in the OS and filesytem. That's why Netap is the only one to use RAID4 and RAID-DP. Netapp is also not the most reliable storage platform out there. If a Cloud is built on file serving protocol I would argue that both BlueARC and have better reliability.
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