TwinStrata Blog » Cloud compute

5 Cloudy Resolutions for Your Data Storage

Nicos Vekiarides — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 02:41:44 +0000

With 2012 already upon us, the time has come to make resolutions for the New Year. In the world of IT, this means resolving to abandon bad habits, unreliable processes and cumbersome tasks that often get in the way of business priorities. With the emergence of cloud storage as a viable means to address growing data storage needs, IT administrators can abandon storage headaches of years past in favor of better, faster and easier processes for managing data.

Cloud storage, in combination with enterprise-class gateways like CloudArray, offers security, availability, and performance that rivals local storage with no fear of vendor lock-in. Moreover, it makes it possible to fulfill New Year’s IT resolutions that were once considered unattainable. With this in mind, here are 5 resolutions that you can live up to by augmenting existing storage infrastructure with the cloud.

Never run out of storage capacity again: Cloud storage provides unlimited, elastic capacity that grows or shrinks with your business needs on a pay-as-you go basis. Not only do you never run out of storage capacity, but more importantly, you can avoid the never-ending cycle of replacing storage arrays that includes complex migrations, costly capital and maintenance expenditures. Even better, on-premise hardware footprint never needs to increase.
Kiss tape backup goodbye: While tape may always have a use for long term archives, many businesses can do away with regular daily tape backups by storing backups in the cloud. With cloud storage you can continue using existing backup software and policies without the hassle, unreliability and manual labor of tape.
Stop purchasing dedicated hardware for disaster recovery: Nothing depletes an IT budget faster than buying data storage systems in pairs in order to have a second system ready for disaster recovery. Typically, dedicated secondary storage systems are only active during disaster test or disaster recovery. The advantage of cloud is that storage and compute infrastructure is available when you need it on a pay-as-you go basis at a fraction of the cost.
Centralize storage management across sites: It’s not easy managing storage in a decentralized environment where every site is a silo with a private storage footprint as there is no easy way to reallocate capacity across sites or cobble a unified disaster recovery strategy. Cloud storage using enterprise-class gateways centralizes storage management across remote offices, offering unlimited, elastic capacity that never requires upgrades/replacements along with built-in centralized disaster recovery to the cloud. Managing multiple sites from a central location is now a reality.
Retain access to a broad ecosystem of solutions: Everyone wants an open ecosystem of solutions including cloud providers and solution providers. Whether you are looking for a private cloud solution, a public cloud solution, or a combination of both, an enterprise-class storage gateway offers you options and provides you the opportunity to choose best-of-breed solutions that meet your needs. Alternatively, if you are looking to leverage your existing storage infrastructure as a starting point, enterprise-class storage gateways can help you enjoy the attributes of cloud storage.

You should look closely at the recent advances in cloud storage and enterprise-class gateway technology. 2012 may just be the year to see your “cloudy” resolutions to fruition.

HP Partner, TwinStrata, Offers Their View on HP Cloud Services

admin — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 03:00:59 +0000

The following article was contributed by Margot Rudell from the HP Scaling the Cloud Blog.

From time to time, we’ll post articles about how specific partners and customers use HP Cloud Services. Today, I’d like to introduce TwinStrata’s CEO and co-founder Nicos Vekiarides and Engineering Manager Mark Aldred.

Nicos co-founded TwinStrata four years ago to bring cloud storage to market in a way that is easy for enterprise customers to use. Today, TwinStrata delivers connectivity to cloud storage with an easy to use web-based user interface and a pay as you go business model.

TwinStrata’s CloudArray 3.0 appliance provides access to cloud storage so that it performs seamlessly with customers’ existing IT infrastructure. The appliance makes cloud storage an attractive option for those enterprise customers, who lack the time to use online storage on their own through APIs. Customers use CloudArray for backup and archiving, offsite storage capacity, and disaster recovery.

According to Nicos, TwinStrata chose to work with HP Cloud Services for three reasons.

First, HP Cloud Services is a good match for TwinStrata, as HP will deliver reliable cloud computing and cloud storage offerings that enterprise customers can trust.

Second, open source software is attractive to application developers and businesses of all sizes, and HP Cloud Services integrates key elements of OpenStack, the emerging standard for open source cloud infrastructure.

Thirdly, working with HP Cloud Services will broaden TwinStrata’s customer market. Through TwinStrata’s CloudArray appliance, traditional hardware and software enterprise customers will soon have access to a business grade cloud provided by HP Cloud Services for their storage needs.

Since HP Cloud Services is still in private beta, TwinStrata is aggressively testing HP Cloud Services’ performance and functionality. Nicos and Mark indicated that HP Cloud Services is performing well in TwinStrata’s tests. “While still in private beta, HP Cloud Services is already very reliable and comparable to other public clouds. We are already impressed,” said Mark Aldred, Engineering Manager, TwinStrata. Nicos, Mark, and the TwinStrata team said they are happy with they’ve seen, including the high performance levels and the speed with which they were able to make progress. Benchmark tests of HP Cloud Services versus other cloud services have been positive. Functional testing of HP Cloud Services has been quick and easy, and the RESTful APIs work exactly as expected. HP Cloud Services’ online forum community is already active and responsive. Mark told us that he was very impressed that he received a very accurate response to a question he posted in the HP Cloud Services forum in less than an hour.

Welcome, TwinStrata! We’re pleased to have you as part of the HP Cloud Services family.

A growing number of customers and partners have already joined the HP Cloud Services ecosystem. If you’re already an HP Cloud Services private beta customer or partner, come tell us your story, share and comment on this article. Feel free to tweet this article or share it through Facebook and LinkedIn. If you’re not yet signed up to participate in our private beta, come join us. Sign up now.

PS: Download a free trial of TwinStrata CloudArray cloud storage gateway for instant iSCSI access to HP cloud storage beta.

Will 2012 be the year of the private cloud?

Nicos Vekiarides — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 02:30:44 +0000

As business adoption of cloud computing and cloud storage takes hold, new benefits of cloud IT versus traditional IT continue to emerge on a regular basis. One recent example is the Carbon Disclosure Project Study 2011: Cloud Computing – The IT Solution for the 21st Century produced by analyst firm Verdantix. In the report, not only are the cost advantages of cloud computing discussed but also the resulting reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Specifically, the study looks at a food and beverage company that is moving an HR application from local IT to the cloud. The model predicts a savings of $12 million over a 5 year period and a reduction of 30,000 tons in CO2 emissions, simply by moving to the public cloud.

So what does all this have to do with 2012 being the year of the private cloud? Let me explain. Interestingly enough, the study also concluded that this same company could save $5M and cut CO2 emissions by 25,000 tons over the same time period but this time by moving to a private cloud. While most of us already assume that public clouds are housed in highly efficient “green” data centers with tremendous economies of scale, the private cloud scenario modeled in this report makes a strong statement that improved resource utilization can drive huge benefits even when all infrastructure stays local. The study goes on to cite other efficiencies of cloud architectures including improved time-to-market which also apply to both public and private clouds.

Whether moving to public or private clouds, the bottom line is that businesses can realize substantial benefits from embracing cloud — in overall utilization, cost savings, emission savings, speed and agility. These are compelling benefits that may indeed persuade those who have resisted the move of their IT infrastructure outside of their four walls to deploy their own private clouds. With open source technologies like OpenStack gaining momentum, do we have the perfect storm for mass private cloud adoption in 2012?

While it’s certain that we will see an increase in private cloud adoption, reports like this may prompt many companies to consider incremental changes to their existing infrastructures to make them more efficient and “cloud-like.” That means we’ll likely see more hybrid deployments that leverage existing infrastructure, create more efficient multi-tenant environments, yet provide the ability to expand with public and/or private cloud deployments in the future.

In the data storage space, technologies such as CloudArray enable businesses to leverage existing infrastructure on the path to public cloud, private cloud or a combination of both. Enabling technologies are key for companies looking to leverage cloud efficiencies in incremental ways, particularly for those with an eye to keeping their options open in the future. And those options not only include public and private clouds but also a variety of cloud providers in each category.

So is 2012 the year of the private cloud? More likely, it will be the year of all clouds whether public, private or hybrid. Regardless of the cloud categories you select for use as components of your infrastructure strategy, consider adopting an enabling technology that not only improves your efficiencies today but also provides you with the most flexible path to the future.

Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid Cloud or Community Cloud: Puzzled Over the Choices?

Nicos Vekiarides — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:29:03 +0000

Perhaps planning a cloud strategy has led you to consider public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds and/or community clouds – not to mention a few “cloud-washed” derivatives that suspiciously resemble traditional IT. With so many varieties of cloud deployments to choose from, you may be a bit confused about which is right for you.

A recent article in Technology Review, Cloud Computing Defined by Simson L. Garfinkel may help shed some light on the topic. Offering a clear definition of each type of cloud deployment, this article sorts through some of the confusion. As a starting point, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines Cloud Computing as “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

In simpler terms, think of cloud as a highly scalable and elastic IT resource that can be utilized on-demand, typically using a pay-as-you-go model. That said, some private clouds may appear pay-as-you-go only from the perspective of the internal user. If you are the internal owner, who purchased the cloud infrastructure, the pay-as-you-go model does not apply.

For the most part, cloud deployments fall into four categories:

Public cloud: A public cloud is owned by a cloud provider and made available to the general public on a multi-tenant, pay-as-you-go basis
Private cloud: A private cloud is owned and deployed by an organization for internal use as a single tenant, and not typically pay-as-you-go unless hosted by a 3^rd party for dedicated use
Community cloud: A community cloud is cooperatively shared by a select set of tenants, often by organizations that are related by a common industry
Hybrid cloud: A hybrid cloud spans the cloud deployment models listed above, enabling applications and data to easily move from one cloud to the other

Although there is no “one-size-fits-all” model, each type of cloud deployment offers unique advantages. A small company may find it beneficial to maintain zero on-premise infrastructure and, therefore, host all of its operations in the public cloud. On the other hand, companies already owning local infrastructure and multiple data center locations may prefer a private cloud located within the logical (if not physical) four walls of their organization. Community clouds bridge the “multi-tenant gap” between public and private clouds by providing a cloud deployment shared only by trusted companies, often in a common vertical market (i.e. medical, educational, legal, etc). Many companies may seek to deploy both private and public clouds for specific portions of their operations, preferring a hybrid cloud deployment. In this case, the public cloud portion may serve as an extension of their primary site or in lieu of a traditional secondary or disaster recovery site.

With the many cloud deployment choices available, which is the right one for your business? Well, one variable to consider is ease of deployment. Public clouds are readily available and allow instant access to compute and storage resources, whereas private clouds have a more complex deployment model that involves on-premise infrastructure. If you are looking for deployment speed, public cloud may be the right choice. If you are looking for absolute control, private cloud may be the better choice.

In the cloud storage world, enterprise storage gateways and hybrid storage arrays, like CloudArray, let you choose from all of the cloud deployment models defined above. Thanks to their flexibility, enterprise storage gateways make utilizing the cloud a very simple matter regardless of cloud deployment model. Whether it’s public, private, community or hybrid cloud storage that you decide upon, you can get started with minimal effort. You can change deployments and/or providers any time without fear of losing data. While security, performance, availability and interoperability are key features of cloud storage gateways, flexibility relative to cloud deployment choices is a significant benefit. Make sure you evaluate your enterprise storage gateway options carefully to ensure you are getting the maximum flexibility.

Regardless of which cloud deployment model you choose today, an enterprise storage gateway will protect your investment by providing compatibility with future cloud deployments. Let us know what type of cloud deployment best fits the needs of your organization.

TMCnet Interview with TwinStrata CEO at CloudExpo

admin — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 13:00:53 +0000

Rich Tehrani from TMCnet recently interviewed our CEO, Nicos Vekiarides, at CloudExpo to discuss TwinStrata solutions and industry trends in cloud storage. Watch the entire interview below:

Interested in learning how CloudArray can benefit your business? Click here to find out more.

Apr. 27 2011 Business Breakfast Topic: Clarity in the Cloud: examining the risks; understanding compliance; maximizing benefits

admin — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 03:22:21 +0000

Pondering whether to use cloud for your business? Join TwinStrata CEO Nicos Vekiarides in what promises to be an informative panel discussion on Wednesday, Apr 27, 2011, 7:00 AM – 9:00 AM ET, Peabody Marriott, 8A Centennial Drive, Peabody, MA Map

The North Shore Technology Council April breakfast features Chris Winn, Senior Manager with Ernst & Young, MacDonnell Ulsch, CEO and Chief Risk Analyst with ZeroPoint Risk Research and Nicos Vekiarides, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder, TwinStrata discussing the risks and benefits of getting in the cloud.

Click here for more information and registration info.

Cloud Analogies for Cloud Storage

Nicos Vekiarides — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 13:00:01 +0000

I ran across a couple of recent posts that used analogies to characterize the role and importance of cloud to IT: one post by David Linthicum calling cloud “IT’s relief valve” and a second post by Mark Peters calling cloud “IT’s shock absorber.” While, on the surface, neither analogy is liable to evoke uncontrollable excitement from an IT professional, there is truly much benefit in the elastic nature of cloud compute and cloud storage. Specifically, cloud helps ease the peaks and/or valleys in demand for IT resources, which often occur inconveniently between purchasing cycles.

In the realm of cloud storage, solutions such as CloudArray let you rapidly and securely expand storage capacity by creating large thin-provisioned storage volumes, up to 384TB each. For IT administrators, this on-demand expansion capability alleviates the worry of running out of storage capacity. Bringing more capacity online no longer necessitates large capital expenditures, incremental power, cooling and floor space; instead, provisioning additional capacity is fast, simple and available from an unlimited resource pool. Just as important, when there is no longer a need for excess capacity, deleting cloud data volumes is equally simple and the incremental expense disappears along with the capacity.

With cloud storage, organizations can not only realize an increased level of IT cost-efficiency, but more importantly, they can achieve IT agility that allows them to keep up with business requirements in real-time without constraints. So while analogies may or may not do justice in describing cloud storage’s inherent benefits, the reality is that the elastic nature of cloud storage can really help businesses of all sizes streamline their IT operations — regardless of whether you call the cloud “IT’s overflow tank,” “IT’s spare tire” or “IT’s backstop.”

Let me know if you think of any other creative cloud analogies. In the meantime, I encourage you to try CloudArray and see how it can transform your IT environment.

6 Key Features of Cloud Storage Gateways (On-ramps or Enablers)

Nicos Vekiarides — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:00:38 +0000

Are you considering cloud storage for your business? There are many reasons you should. Using innovative cloud technology, IT is solving data storage problems in new ways. Whether it’s for off-site data protection, disaster recovery or just storage capacity expansion, the pay-as-you go model pioneered by a number of cloud storage providers can be very compelling.

Rather than use cloud storage directly by writing to custom APIs, building your own security policies and architecting a performance framework to meet application needs, you may find that on-premise cloud storage software or hardware (i.e. gateways, on-ramps, enablers) make integration simpler. Purchasing a product that handles security, performance, data reduction and plug-and-play integration can significantly accelerate and simplify deployment.

With a handful of gateway products already on the market that can connect your on-premise environment to cloud storage, a natural question may (or should) be “what is the difference between these products?” above and beyond the aforementioned functionality.

To answer this, we’ve put together a list of 6 differentiating features you should consider when choosing a cloud storage gateway:

1) Dynamic caching policies to meet application needs: A monolithic cloud storage cache may not be able to handle the performance needs for all applications. A backup application may benefit from a cache consisting of low-cost storage optimized for large sequential access, while an NTFS file system may benefit more from an SSD-based cache, optimized for smaller, more randomized access. Each application may require more or less cache over time. Having application-specific caching policies that are dynamic means you can meet needs of different applications using a single solution.

2) Option to replicate a local copy to the cloud: Some vendors argue that having a full local copy defeats the purpose of cloud storage – not at all true! Imagine replacing a real-time replicated secondary site requiring hardware, infrastructure and maintenance costs with a pay-as-you-go cloud! Or imagine not having a secondary site to begin with and now finding a 2-site replication solution within easy reach. This is a very compelling business proposition, particularly for transactional applications that require a full local copy for latency reasons.

3) In-cloud snapshots: Snapshots are rapidly becoming a key part of modernized backup and, when using the cloud, it is important to find out whether a gateway solution offers snapshots. If yes, are the snapshots copy-on-write and on-premise, meaning potential bandwidth thrashing between the local site and the cloud? Or are the snapshots in-cloud, redirect-on write, meaning no bandwidth penalty or performance penalty and readily available in case of disaster? If you have the option of the latter, you may have gathered that it is far superior.

4) Block and file-level access: It’s amazing to hear arguments from vendors trying to convince users that file access is better than block access for cloud gateways. The reality is that there are advantages to file access and advantages to block access. Supporting both means supporting that widest variety of operating systems, file systems and applications; and there is no longer any argument. Hint: having native block access (like iSCSI) means you can support both.

5) “Zero-friction” entry point to cloud storage: Deploying cloud storage should not mean continuing to spend additional CapEx/OpEx associated with traditional storage infrastructure and incurring the same 3-yr upgrade cycles. Sure, there are advantages to optimized hardware appliances for accessing cloud storage, but only when needs and budget dictate. A choice of software, hardware and subscription models with upgrade paths between each are the ideal way to start using cloud storage with minimal risk/cost and the ability to grow.

6) In-cloud disaster recovery and Compute-Anywhere capability: Once your data is in the cloud, you can access it anywhere, but how about in the cloud? Why not be able to leverage unlimited pay-as-you-go cloud compute cycles for disaster recovery or test. Beyond disaster recovery, your data or snapshots of data can and should “work” for you in the cloud. You can even leverage Big Data without dedicated processing resources by using cloud compute. Think about a vision of a hybrid data center and how this capability can enhance IT.

In summary, all cloud gateways, on-ramps, or enablers are not equal and it takes looking beyond the similarities in features to understand whether they will meet the needs specific to your environment and grow to meet your future needs. It pays to look under the covers before purchasing…

Perhaps you have found a cloud storage solution that has all of these features. If you haven’t, we suggest you consider a cloud storage solution that does….

TwinStrata and PEER 1 Team Up to Deliver Enterprise Class Cloud Storage

admin — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 21:14:42 +0000

TwinStrata conintues to broaden its partner ecosystem with leading cloud storage providers. Here is yet another example…

NATICK, Mass. and VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Jan. 31, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — TwinStrata, Inc., the leading innovator in iSCSI SAN, data protection and disaster recovery solutions using cloud storage, today announced it has achieved Bronze Partner Program status with international hosting provider, PEER 1 Hosting (TSX: PIX), further demonstrating TwinStrata’s continued commitment to supporting the industry’s key cloud storage providers along with their customers.

Read the full press release…

TwinStrata’s CEO is Tapped by ESJ for 2011 Cloud Predictions

admin — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 03:54:38 +0000

The Year Ahead in Cloud Computing

The pressure to create a cloud presence will only become stronger in 2011. What IT needs to know to be prepared for Cloud Storage is outlined in an Enterprise Systems Journal (ESJ) article authored by TwinStrata’s CEO and Co-Founder, Nicos Vekiarides.

ESJ approached Nicos for this article because they wanted an inside perspective of the emerging cloud storage market. TwinStrata is a leader in cloud storage enablement solutions to provide companies of any size with iSCSI SAN solutions for offsite data protection, archive, and disaster recovery.

Please take a moment and read the ESJ article: The Year Ahead in Cloud Computing