TwinStrata Blog » cloud ROI

Why a Massachusetts High School Picked TwinStrata CloudArray over Competition

admin — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:26:33 +0000

Kyle Jones, technology manager, Essex Agricultural and Technical High School in Hathorne, MA tested cloud gateway products from Nasuni and TwinStrata to meet specific IT budget and operational objectives. The reasons TwinStrata won out are worth reading about, especially if you are part of a small to medium size business considering cloud storage for either offsite backup, archive, or disaster recovery and business continuity.

Mr. Jones was interviewed recently by TechTarget Senior Site Editor, Andrew Burton where he discussed his requirements, offsite storage/data protection options, and why CloudArray was a better business and technology solution choice to handle the school’s backup to cloud storage needs.

You can read more about it here: High School Deploys TwinStrata CloudArray Cloud Storage Gateway

Cloud Storage Performance: I/O Does Matter

admin — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 13:57:42 +0000

One of the first decisions you will need to make when tuning your environment for Cloud Storage I/O is what page size you will use to perform writes to your Cloud Storage Provider (CSP). This is one of the configuration parameters you will enter when configuring a new volume in CloudArray.

Page sizing is an important consideration, and represents the smallest unit of data that will be sent to your CSP from your CloudArray appliance, or read back when needed. Choose a size that is too small and you may have to do a lot more I/Os if you need to move a lot of data in bulk. Choose a size that’s too big and you will move more data than you need to.

For example, if your application needs to read a lot of small chunks of data that don’t already reside in your CloudArray cache, then CloudArray will have to issue read requests to the CSP for each of those chunks. If each chunk was 64K in length, and they weren’t contiguous, then CloudArray might have to issue 4 separate read requests for that data. If the data were contiguous, then only 1 read request would need to be made.

Larger Page Sizes will result in more data being read than is needed for the current operation, but it may help performance if that data is needed at any point while it is still in cache. In CloudArray, you can choose variable page sizes from 128 KB (default) all the way to 2 MB. 512 KB is the recommended value for backups and in cases where there is a lot of sequential I/O.

If you do a lot of random small block I/O, you should choose the smaller default page size. This will prevent having to move a lot of empty data between your CSP and the CloudArray appliance. A large page size here will cause slower overall performance since a lot more pages will have to be written to accommodate the data requirements. Likewise, if you are doing backups, you will want the 512 KB (or larger) page size. This will result in fewer overall writes compared to a smaller block size and performance will increase.

This can have an impact in your cost model as well, but nowhere nearly as much as some vendors selling file system-based appliances would have you believe. Some CSP’s will charge a small per transaction fee for each read or write request you make. For Amazon S3 for example, the charge is $0.00001 per write transaction. And so for a 1TB backup, that amounts to 8,388,608 x 128KB transactions, or $83. If you used a 512KB page size, that would amount to 2,097,152 write transactions, or $20 for the write transaction costs. Reads are cheaper by an order of ten. That’s a far cry from the $1K+ figure for a 100GB write that another vendor would cost you.

Visit www.TwinStrata.comfor more info about CloudArray.

Storage Cloud-o-Nomics

Nicos Vekiarides — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 23:55:31 +0000

You may have read a recent blog entry by a leading industry analyst addressing cloud storage ROI: 20TB of public cloud storage as a service at Amazon’s S3 rate of $0.15/GB per month totals $3,000 per month, or a whopping $36,000 per year. Some do-it-yourselfers responded they can build 4 storage arrays for this one-year price. But can acquiring a glut of storage capacity give your business offsite data protection? Can it instill confidence that your business will be able to survive a complete loss of your primary site data?

We recently used Clarity AP to conduct a total cost of ownership (TCO) analysis of cloud storage as an offsite replicated tier of storage accessible via our cloud gateway, CloudArray. For the analysis, we assume a company with a single site for data storage and linear capacity growth over 3 years. We calculated the 3 year TCO of an in-house implemented offsite tier of replicated storage versus replicated storage to the cloud. We plotted the capacity crossover point up to which cloud storage holds a cost advantage.

While we invite everyone to look at the full report, here’s a brief summary:

Cloud storage may make sense for capacities up to 60TB for replicated data. At these capacities, cloud storage benefits from a pay as you go model that does not suffer the underutilization experienced in storage arrays. As a remote site data protection solution, cloud storage substantially reduces the need for offsite infrastructure and management.

The chart below illustrates the crossover point:

3-yr TCO for offsite replicated storage

For the initial TB of capacity, costs for an in-house solution over a 3 year period are $233,492, compared to $79,794 for cloud storage. For 20 TB, there is a $100,000 savings when data is replicated to a cloud provider.

The report lists results, configurations and cost assumptions. The analysis purposely neglects to factor local site floor/power/cooling since some may argue these are sunk costs. It also does not address application/compute failover which is a separate analysis.

Conclusion

Based on the results of this analysis, cloud storage can be very compelling for companies replicating up to 60 TB to a public cloud. For a mid-sized company or departments within a larger organization, this represents a substantial capacity range across which cloud storage presents a strong ROI. Watch for this range to expand even higher over the course of the next 3 years with more favorable cloud pricing and tiers of service.

Can your business benefit from cloud storage? Let us know.