TwinStrata Blog » Cloud Services

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.

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.

8 Sure Signs of “Cloud Washing”

Nicos Vekiarides — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 12:59:24 +0000

Perhaps you have heard the phrase “cloud washing” referring to IT products and infrastructure that have been rather deceptively labeled “cloud,” but are really traditional enterprise IT infrastructure in disguise. Without going into specifics, we’ve all seen numerous examples of pre-existing products that have suddenly emerged with nothing more than a new name incorporating “cloud.”

While the term cloud may seem overused as a result, its original meaning and intention carries a key set of attributes that can be very compelling to businesses of all sizes. True cloud compute, cloud storage or cloud infrastructure is elastic, pay-as-you-go and available on-demand from a virtually unlimited pool of resources. A key attribute of cloud is what we term the “Zero-Friction Entry Point,” meaning you can get started with zero cost and zero risk.

Quite frankly, while we’re always up for a good discussion, it can get rather old fielding questions and drawing comparisons to “cloud washed” products. So, in the interest of helping educate the IT community on how to spot “cloud washing,” we decided to put together a concise (albeit light-hearted) list of 8 sure signs that you’ve purchased a cloud product that’s not really cloud. Without further ado,

8 Sure Signs of a “cloud washed” product

8. The product arrives on four pallets in a Mack truck
7. Your cooling bill doubles and free floor space vanishes
6. The product’s box has a cloud spray-painted on the side
5. You request a “pay-as-you-go” model but instead receive a “36-month easy payment plan”
4. On-demand expansion means 90 days after contacting a sales rep
3. The phone number for on-demand reduction is always busy
2. Your job title is now “cloud administrator”, but you’re doing the same thing as before

and , finally

1. After two years, your sales rep calls to say, “Upgrade time!”

That’s it for now — feel free to share your experiences and any other sure signs of “cloud washing.”

TwinStrata CloudArray Picked as Finalist in Storage Magazine/SearchStorage 2010 Products of the Year Competition

admin — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:13:40 +0000

Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) Software and Services: 2010 Products of the Year Finalists Announced

From nearly 200 entries, the judges of Storage magazine’s and SearchStorage.com’s 2010 Products of the Year awards have selected 43 products as finalists including TwinStrata CloudArray. CloudArray was selected as a finalist in the Backup and Disaster Recovery Software and Services category which covers backup, recovery, DR, snapshot, replication, electronic vaulting, and archives.

TwinStrata CloudArray Enables Westway to Easily Cut Storage Costs Without Compromising Data Protection

admin — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 14:27:03 +0000

Westway is a company located in New Orleans, specializing in Bulk Chemical Storage and Liquid Feeds. The numerous challenges they faced included trying to figure out how to establish a way to flexibly add storage as they grew without breaking the bank and reduce onsite infrastructure complexity and costs – all targeted at cost effectively satisfying data storage and retention requirements while ensuring full data control and access and rapid recovery.

The accompanynig case study discusses Westways’ experience using CloudArray for offsite data protection that reduced their overnight backups to just a few hours making.

Enterprise class online backup and cloud storage just got easier in the Big Easy. Read more:

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.

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

TwinStrata 2011 New Year Resolutions and Customer Commitments

admin — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 15:19:12 +0000

We hope your holiday was all you wished it would be and that this blog posting finds you well rested, rejuvenated, and still enjoying the cheer and joy of the season. And as you prepare for what’s certain to be a very busy and exciting 2011 in IT, we’d like to unveil a few of TwinStrata’s New Year Resolutions or should we say TwinStrata’s Year-After-Year Resolution Extensions:

1. We won’t rest on our past laurels

Our 2010 success is in the rear view mirror and although a great foundation to build upon going forward, our future success cannot be attained or exceeded without putting forth the same concerted focus on hard work, dedication, and commitment to your growing business needs. We value your trust and will strive to be your solution in 2011 for offsite data protection and disaster recovery.

2. We will continue to deliver quality solutions to solve real business problems in offsite data protection/DR

IT challenges are very real – especially for small and medium size businesses – who consider economic uncertainty, keeping pace with technology and access to adequate capital at the top of the list. Therefore, solutions ought not be complicated to deploy, difficult to use, intrusive to the business, and create vendor lock-in or dependencies. TwinStrata CloudArray, more than any of our competitors, truly “gets” the cloud. It’s not just cheap, offsite storage to us but an convergent ecosystem of fast networks, virtualization, automation and policies, diverse file and operating system environments, and a distributed enterprise infrastructure. CloudArray was designed to seamlessly enable and extend this end-to-end ecosystem to the cloud.

3. We will continue to listen and stay apprised of our customers’ cloud storage enablement needs

Customer satisfaction is derived from many standpoints – service, support, quality, product capabilities, and reliability to name a few. TwinStrata’s success is a result of listening to our customer’s needs, demonstrating our business and technological agility to meet their needs, and being able to build their growth requirements into our short, medium, and long-term strategies. TwinStrata will always endeavor to work with customers this way to become a trusted advisor and partner enabling them to seamlessly include cloud storage in their plans.

4. We will continue to stay true to our core CloudArray solution values and avoid “miracle” solutions

Technology usually flops when it claims to be more than it can be/do or even should be. TwinStrata’s value proposition is to provide businesses with innovative, best-in-class iSCSI storage solutions for enterprise-class offsite data protection and disaster recovery. TwinStrata’s core value is to enable businesses of all sizes to adopt cloud storage easily, securely, and economically without business interruption or change. These core values will only continue to advance in 2011.

5. We will continue to ensure our solution claims match our substantiations

TwinStrata is confident in its CloudArray solution to enable offsite data protection and disaster recovery. Our confidence and our claims really stem from our customers including these proven testimonial areas: 1) Overall peace of mind CloudArray brings to them as a result of the product quality and reliability, 2) Ease and simplicity of deployment and usability, 3) Seamless and secure integration with cloud storage providers, 4) Investment protection from not having to change applications or policies, 5) Immediacy of business and operational results, and 6) Quantifiable savings – time, capex/opex, and resources – delivered by CloudArray.

6. We will continue to strive to support our customers’ cloud storage goals – tactical and strategic alike

We believe that cloud storage will have a breakout year in 2011. And TwinStrata CloudArray will be leading the way with innovative ways to help businesses plan and justify tactical uses of the cloud for offsite data protection, DR, and other storage initiatives. Additionally, TwinStrata will continue in 2011 to advance how CloudArray can help companies’ today build and implement business continuity strategies that were once financially unattainable to small and medium size business.

TwinStrata understands that our customers are a vital part of our growth and success. We value your trust in our company, and are committed to working harder to bring you the levels of innovation, quality, reliability, and support you’ve come to expect from TwinStrata to meet your business expectations in 2011.

Thank you and Happy New Year!

BNMC Relies on TwinStrata CloudArray and Best Practices to Avoid Disastrous Data Loss

admin — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:34:23 +0000

Customer Success: Critical Business Data Saved

BNMC; a Mass. based strategic information technology (IT) network services company, selected TwinStrata CloudArray® to provide backup services for their clients. A virtual appliance that runs on VMware, CloudArray can be deployed for backup, archive, or disaster recovery/business continuity requirements. Key to effective and rapid data recovery in the event of a site disaster is CloudArray‟s metadata so protecting this critical information is top of mind for system administrators. Eryck Bredy, BNMC President & CTO, has always been an advocate of following best practices and one day, he averted a disaster as a result. You see, Eryck accidentally deleted the CloudArray VM he was working on, rendering it terminal. This VM had 1TB of customer data on it. But Eryck wasn‟t worried. He knew that he could easily recover the data with CloudArray since he did, in fact, follow best practices, and had backed up the CloudArray configuration data. And because there was a full copy of the data in the cloud, he knew CloudArray was imminently recoverable in and of itself. After accidentally deleting the CloudArray VM (CAVM1), Eryck simply imported a new CloudArray VM (CAVM2), reset t he cache, and restored the backup of CAVM1 to CAVM2. That was it. When CAVM2 was powered on, it replayed the metadata and back-filled its cache with the data from the cloud on an as needed basis. Because of the rapid and seamless recovery capabilities of CloudArray, BNMC business interruption was avoided. And since all user data was in the cloud, CAVM2 simply re-enabled access to it without incident.

“Bottom line – unfortunate incidents are going to happen. The important thing is to be ready when they do. Using TwinStrata CloudArray helped us mitigate the effects of losing critical data and enabled us to protect the trust our customers have in BNMC.” – Eryck Bredy, BNMC President & CTO

As widespread adoption of cloud services increases, it‟s comforting to BNMC to know that solutions like CloudArray are in place to help. For Eryck, the combination of CloudArray and BNMC best practices helped avoid a potentially disastrous situation for their clients, the loss of their critical business data.

TwinStrata Delivers Newest Version of its Leading CloudArray® Offsite Data Protection and Disaster Recovery Solution

admin — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 20:17:51 +0000

CloudArray® Version 2.0 is available in both virtual and physical appliance configurations.

The new CloudArray Version 2.0 includes a broad range of updates designed to further enhance the overall operation, reliability, and performance of CloudArray’s robust and proven feature set for offsite data protection, archive, and disaster recovery. Additionally, CloudArray 2.0 expands its reach to include direct integration with Mezeo, Peer1, and Scalitycloud storage platforms, offering customers more choice and flexibility when implementing a cloud storage strategy. Other CloudArray 2.0 enhancements include support for HA clustering, Solaris interoperability, alert and portal improvements and performance improvements to the virtual appliance.

CloudArray V2.0 is available today from TwinStrata and through its network of partners. For more information, visit www.twinstrata.com/cloudarray, email sales@twinstrata.com or call 508-651-0199.

You can also try CloudArray FREE for 30 days: www.twinstrata.com/cloudarray_evaluation

TwinStrataCloudArray is a proven solution that can significantly reduce capex/opex by enabling companies of all sizes to easily adopt offsite data protection and disaster recovery solutions in minutes without any changes to existing applications or need for new programming or APIs in order to connect with cloud storage providers. TwinStrata provides enterprise-class data protection solutions that are simple, affordable, and secure. These solutions leverage the scalability and efficiency of cloud storage while maintaining the availability, performance, and security of local storage. CloudArray software provides a substantial advantage over traditional off-site storage solutions, with a pay-as-you-go model, unlimited elastic capacity, local performance, in-cloud snapshots, AES256 bit encryption, and on-site, off-site or in-the-cloud access to data.