Truth is, cloud storage addresses long-standing IT priorities, with three of these priorities topping the list nearly every year:

• Improving backup and recovery: Tapes and offsite backup continue to be a struggle and do not offer the reliability or recovery times that many businesses demand. Moving off-site backups to the cloud improves the recoverability of backups without tape or dedicated infrastructure. Moreover, it offers the choice of leveraging existing backup software or modernizing backup software and processes.
• Managing data growth effectively: As capacity grows, storage array life cycles mandate adding, replacing and decommissioning storage arrays whenever they run out of capacity, all involving considerable capital expense and internal administration. Cloud storage can instead provide an unlimited pool of storage that is on-demand and pay-as-you-go. For the financially minded, this enables replacing capital and administrative expense with pure operating expense (opex) and near-zero administration.
• Improving business continuity and disaster recovery: For many businesses, it has become standard practice to duplicate on-site storage equipment expenses to build out a disaster recovery facility. For others, it may mean skimping on disaster recovery because of the high costs. Cloud storage enables turning disaster recovery expenses into opex while maintaining recovery time objectives that rival dedicated solutions.

So what is the challenge for cloud becoming an initiative for businesses? Let’s think of the early days of server virtualization. Priorities such as server consolidation and reducing server hardware footprint existed well before server virtualization. However, it took some time before virtualization gained mainstream acceptance. Indeed we may be in the midst of the same type of transition, with cloud storage moving from an adopter solution to a mainstream initiative.

What’s even more exciting about cloud storage is that it’s extremely simple for businesses to get started. Whereas traditional storage infrastructure requires a forklift to deliver and install, a software download of CloudArray and 10-15 minutes of configuration nets you Terabytes or Petabytes of secure storage capacity that’s ready to use. If you haven’t tried cloud storage, consider adding it to your 2012 initiatives.

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Amazon’s move validates the need for an iSCSI cloud storage gateway to easily deliver cloud storage into business environments and acknowledges that integration through APIs is not a process businesses will easily embrace. The deeper implication is that gateways facilitate the adoption of cloud storage as an alternative to on-premise or off-premise traditional storage, helping Amazon tap into a large multi-billion dollar data storage market. Does this mean more cloud providers may want to offer a gateway in the future? You bet.

There’s a lot of product differentiation between AWS Gateway and existing storage gateway products like CloudArray. Caching, performance, encryption, deduplication, compression, disaster recovery, high availability, ease of use, administration, storage capacity are all points of comparison one should consider. I’m sure there will be plenty published by users comparing hands-on experiences, so I won’t dive into deeper details here beyond mentioning one fly in the ointment: the AWS Gateway supports only one cloud provider.

Whether it’s purchasing servers or storage, businesses naturally prefer to have choices. And our cloud storage experience has been similar with customers preferring to have the flexibility to choose from a broad array of cloud providers including  Amazon, AT&T, Nirvanix, Rackspace, HP Cloud and PEER1 to name a few. Additionally, we are seeing increased interest in private clouds like OpenStack, EMC Atmos, Mezeo, Nirvanix, Scality and some businesses are even using existing storage as a starting point. If you plan to use multiple providers, are considering private cloud or at least want the flexibility to keep those options open in the future, a multi-provider gateway is a better solution.

Bottom line? Amazon’s announcement further positions cloud storage as a viable alternative to traditional on-premise and off-premise solutions. It presents one more way for businesses to easily connect to Amazon cloud storage and having more gateway choices is always a win for the customer. For customers seeking a robust, enterprise-class feature set and the industry’s broadest choice of public and private cloud providers, solutions like CloudArray continue to be the best option.

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I came up with a quick test: copy one gigabyte of fully random data to the cloud, broken up into 32768 32k files. The questions are, how long would it take for a user to copy that much data to a CloudArray volume, and how soon before all of that data is safely stored in the cloud?

To set up the test, I used an old, slow laptop to run CloudArray. (That’s what I had handy in my office…) I used just the default basic configuration of a 25G cache to configure a single 100G encrypted volume, attached to Amazon S3, and mapped to a linux client. I formatted the volume with an ext3 file system and used the ‘cp’ command to copy the files. As a basis for comparison, I used an open-source file transfer utility, CyberDuck, to transfer exactly the same files to exactly the same the S3 account.

I’ve broken the CloudArray results down into two events: the data was “usable” when the ‘cp’ operation completes, and “complete” once all of the data had been copied to the cloud. At the usable point, any host attached to the CloudArray could access any of the files, as they were all stored in the local cache. In the background, the CloudArray busily pushed the data to the cloud, and when it was done, I considered the test complete. Of course, for the transfer utility, there’s no such split. The data was either copied to the cloud, or not.

The results of running the test were, well, dramatic:

For the record, that’s 6:22 (min:sec) for the CloudArray to reach the usable state and another 3:19 to reach the complete state, while it took the file transfer 110:05 to transfer exactly the same data.

What’s the reason for the huge difference? Well, I confess that I did set up this test to highlight one of the advantages of CloudArray; because we’re block-based, we’re not sensitive to the kinds of problems that plague file-based approaches.

The caching accounts for the rapid time to usability, but the more significant part of the equation is the aggregation that CloudArray performs due to the block-level IO. We send out all data in large, cloud-optimized chunks. Cloud storage provider systems store a single 1M object faster than they store a 32k object, so sending them 1024 1M objects is easier for them to handle. That same arithmetic applies to the number of requests, so that we sent 1024 PUT requests as opposed to the 32768 PUTs that CyberDuck (and, indeed, any file-based cloud utility) must send to handle this particular workload.

In other words, regardless of the size or number of files that you store on a CloudArray volume, traffic to the cloud is optimized to give the best performance.

To test read performance, I just copied the same files back from the cloud. Using CloudArray, that once again gave two separate cases: either all of the files were already in local cache, which meant that it was roughly the same as a local file copy, or they weren’t, in which case the data had to be read back from the cloud. Again, the data was automatically read from the cloud in large chunks, giving the best performance. The copy was performed with the ‘cp’ command on the linux host, and compared to CyberDuck transferring the files back.

The results are actually pretty symmetrical with respect to the original write performance:

Copying all the files from the local CloudArray cache took 6:05, while invalidating the cache and doing the same copy again took 11:42. On the other hand, the utility transfer took 112:24.

None of the numbers that I’ve given are all that useful for comparison with other environments. A large number of factors affect actual performance, e.g. WAN speed, LAN speed, and local disk speed, and I made no attempt to optimize any of them. A faster local disk or SSD, for example, would substantially reduce the time to usability. The importance of these results is the relative performance of CloudArray when compared to the raw transfer, and those results are impressive: 17.3x faster to usability, 11.4x faster to durability, and 9.6x faster to reload (18.4x if the data is in cache).

That’s minutes versus hours.

It’s a quick cup of coffee versus a three-martini lunch.

It’s renewing online versus waiting at the DMV.

It’s time saved.

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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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

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1. Hybrid data storage environments combining cloud storage with existing storage. For most companies, the notion of moving all of their data to the cloud is not fathomable. However, continuously expanding data storage needs are fueling a need for more capacity. What better way to address this need than with cloud storage? The benefits include access to a secure, limitless pool of storage capacity, no future need for upgrade or replacement and reduced capital expenses. Look for auto-tiering technologies to seamlessly combine hybrid cloud and on-premise environments in a way that operates with existing applications.
2. Private cloud environments in enterprise companies. Enterprises looking to leverage the economies, efficiencies and scale of cloud providers are adopting cloud models in-house, such as OpenStack, for both compute and storage environments. These private clouds offer scale, agility and price/performance typically unmatched by traditional infrastructure solutions and can reside inside a company’s firewall. In the storage space, look for technologies that can combine existing SAN infrastructure and private cloud storage into a unified Cloud SAN.
3. Disaster recovery to the cloud as a viable option. Traditionally, companies that need disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) have relied on dedicated replicated infrastructure at an offsite location to be able to recover from physical disaster. This means paying for idle hardware that’s waiting for a disaster. DR in the cloud, on the other hand, means not having to pay for this infrastructure except when it is needed. The tradeoff? While not necessarily a zero-downtime solution, look for cloud DR with recovery time objectives (RTOs) in a matter of hours.
4. Disaster recovery from the cloud as a new need. What happens to business data stored by SaaS application in the case of a disaster? The truth is most SaaS providers do have a DR strategy, but many businesses will demand a recovery strategy under their control. Look for emergence of solutions that backup SaaS data either locally or to an alternate provider as an extra level of protection.
5. Simplified onboarding of applications to the cloud. Certain business applications can move entirely to the cloud, thereby saving the administrative and maintenance headaches of their hardware/software platforms onsite. Many IT-strapped businesses can benefit from tools to make this migration viable. Look for robust tool sets that can migrate applications to a choice of cloud providers – and also bring those applications back on-premise should the need arise.
6. Non-relational databases for big data. NoSQL databases, like Apache CouchDB, enable tremendous scalability in order to meet the needs of Terabytes and Petabytes of data accessed by millions of users. Big data will force many companies to consider these alternatives to traditional databases and cloud deployment models will simplify the roll-out. Look for vendors providing supported NoSQL solutions.
7. Use of the cloud for analytics. Analytics tend to require a scalable compute and storage environment as well as rather expensive software. Similar to idle hardware for disaster recovery purposes, analytics for many businesses may represent a seasonal need that only runs in short bursts and may not justify purchasing a dedicated software/hardware environment. Analytic environments in the cloud can turn the expense into a “pay-per-use” bill, meeting business goals at a far lower price point.
8. SSD tiers of storage in the cloud. Moving higher performance applications into the cloud doesn’t always guarantee that they will get the level of performance they need from their data storage. By offering high-performance tiers of storage that are SSD-based (i.e. flash), cloud providers will be able to address the needs for predictable and faster application response times.
9. Improvements in data reduction technology. With cloud storage commanding a per GB operating expense, deduplication and compression technologies have become rather ubiqitous in minimizing costs. While some may argue the capacity optimization game has played out, there is still the challenge of capacity optimization on a more global scale across multiple tenants and a challenge for rich media content which does not fare particularly well with today’s reduction technologies. Look for the introduction of new data reduction technologies that address both needs.
10. “Cloud-envy” from cloud laggards. While many companies have already adopted the cloud and many more will adopt in 2012, others may still wait and ponder well past 2012. Regardless of which category a company falls into, the economics and efficiencies of the cloud have become irrefutable. As a result, some of the laggards will likely seek ways to leverage cloud methodologies that improve IT efficiency on-premise. Undoubtedly, some will fall prey to cloudwashing by purchasing traditional IT infrastructure named “cloud” in an attempt to satisfy their “cloud-envy.”

Bottom line? Cloud deployments are becoming simpler and more secure and the economics continue to improve. Which of these trends will your business follow in 2012?

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Having a goal to remove or minimize remote office storage infrastructure makes a lot of sense. Given most remote locations no longer have dedicated IT staffing onsite, an increased and significant burden can be avoided for the administrators working at main locations.

Improving overall application performance at remote offices also makes a lot of sense to maximize productivity of remote workers. The good news?  There currently exists in the marketplace a category of devices that provides local speed data storage access with a very small footprint: cloud storage gateways. Even better, CloudArray, an enterprise storage gateway from TwinStrata, enables local speed iSCSI access to a broad choice of public cloud storage providers, private cloud storage providers and/or existing storage, representing one of the the industry’s most flexible storage solutions.

A recent 2011 ESG survey of remote office and branch office environments revealed that a third of remote offices with over 25 employees had an average of 25TB of data at each remote office, a considerable amount of storage to maintain and manage. Taking a closer look, the following pie chart breaks down remote office storage infrastructure by type:

According to the survey results, 56% of storage deployed at ROBOs consists of SAN or NAS storage, reflecting the priority for local speed data access at those locations. The tradeoff is that managing enterprise storage infrastructure at those locations can lead to a number of headaches around

• Hardware life cycles and upgrades
• Running out of and replenishing capacity
• Providing backup, replication or disaster recovery for the data stored at each site

Enterprise storage gateways are a great way to consolidate remote site storage footprint to software-only installations or small form-factor appliances while, at the same time, maintaining the plug-compatibility, speed and capacity of local storage infrastructure. Moreover, consolidation allows administrators to centralize data storage at a primary data center or in the cloud with the following advantages

• A local iSCSI interface at each site without the iSCSI storage array footprint
• Data reduction (compression and deduplication) before data is sent to the primary site or cloud, increasing usable centralized capacity
• Ability to re-allocate capacity simply and dynamically between remote sites without moving hardware
• Ability to maintain a cache or a full local copy that is replicated to the primary site or cloud for a multi-site disaster recovery strategy

Finally, a software enterprise storage gateway can be deployed virtually anywhere in the world in minutes, without additional hardware, allowing IT to rapidly meet ever-changing business needs.

If you are concerned about making the tradeoff between infrastructure footprint and performance for ROBO environments, it may be time to consider the benefits of an enterprise storage gateway solution.

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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.

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For many businesses that haven’t yet formulated their cloud adoption plans, the notion of looking beyond the cloud may sound a bit peculiar. After all, isn’t cloud the final frontier that promises to transform traditional IT infrastructure into a control panel offering limitless resources on-demand? That is certainly the outcome that many businesses aspire to. The truth is, regardless of the outcome, much can be gleaned from examining how cloud infrastructure influences business IT efficiencies.

Let’s take a look at public cloud storage and how it has inspired new ways of thinking when it comes to storage infrastructure management. For some, it may be difficult to look beyond the logistics of public cloud storage which often dictate moving data into a distant data center and relinquishing a certain amount of control. However, the benefits of adopting the cloud bring IT efficiencies that could not be otherwise realized, eliminating one of the more burdensome aspects of data storage management.

What burdensome aspect is that? Specifically, the sprawl of storage infrastructure

• In the primary data center – Storage arrays have a recurring life cycle that demands upgrading and replacing equipment on a regular basis as capacity needs increase.  The process is costly, disruptive, risky and causes overlap of equipment costs, underutilization and overpayment for unused capacity. Read all about the storage array lifecycle here and learn how a large school system changed that pattern once and for all.
• In the remote office or branch office – While recent surveys such as ESG’s Remote Office/Branch Office Technology Trends show that a large number of businesses would prefer to centralize their data storage, the numbers reveal that most still have data storage at remote sites, primarily consisting of SAN or NAS devices. This not only perpetuates the management lifecycle described above, but does so for unmanned sites with no dedicated administrative staff, clearly an IT management nightmare.
• For disaster recovery – Replicated storage infrastructure for disaster recovery costs as much to purchase, run and maintain as primary storage infrastructure and has the same life cycle issues described above, not to mention redundant and costly facilities.
• For peaks and valleys in demand – Here, storage infrastructure remains primarily idle and unused except when capacity needs increase for certain projects, testing, development or analytics that may occur seasonally

The solution for this sprawl does not necessarily involve moving all storage infrastructure to the cloud. For many businesses, that is simply not a practical, realistic or fathomable near-term solution. However, the consolidation of storage infrastructure is clearly a viable strategy.

A reasonable approach might be to leave the main data center as is but start to address data storage sprawl that is occurring in remote locations. What if you could reduce the remote and branch office storage footprint to a single piece of software per site?  What if you could substantially reduce the storage capacity required for disaster recovery while at the same time pooling storage resources to address peaks and valleys in demand? Sprawl would diminish, utilization would improve and administrative burden would lessen.

The cloud can indeed be a means to this end. However, there are other options to consider. For instance, you could use CloudArray as your storage gateway and have a choice of consolidating the sprawl to a public cloud, private cloud, existing storage infrastructure or a combination of all three. Bottom line?  You can reduce sprawl without having to rely on any particular type of cloud, realize significant cost and administrative savings, and replace your ever expanding storage footprint with software, thereby eliminating a complex life cycle.

Keep in mind there is nothing magical about the storage infrastructure that backs cloud storage. Rather, cloud storage is all about the methodologies that squeeze the utmost efficiency out of commoditized storage components, culminating from years of experience on the part of cloud providers.  For this reason, businesses need to look beyond adopting cloud — and instead, look to adopt cloud methodologies that can bring them substantial IT efficiencies.

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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.

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