TwinStrata Blog » Cloud

Is it Time to Look Beyond the Cloud?

Nicos Vekiarides — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:57:43 +0000

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.

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.”

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.

Higher Education Lunch Session: Learn How To Capitalize on Cloud Storage Today

admin — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 21:18:25 +0000

Is Data Growth Getting You Down? Then Look Up To the Cloud!

Thursday, February 10, 2001
TwinStrata Offices
24 Prime Parkway, Suite 301A
Natick, MA 01760
9:30 AM to 1:00 PM

TwinStrata Can Help Colleges & Universities Capitalize on Cloud Storage…Simply, Securely, and Affordably

Are you looking for ways to battle shrinking budgets yet still address the need for ever-increasing storage capacity, efficient off-site data protection and affordable disaster recovery across your campuses?

Using TwinStrata CloudArray®, an affordable iSCSI data protection and disaster recovery cloud storage solution, can bring relief. It’s non-intrusive and non-disruptive, requiring no “rip and replace” of any existing application or infrastructure.

Attend our Higher Education Lunch session on Thursday, February 10, 2011 and learn how TwinStrata can help you:

Turn capex into opex
Balance your capacity demand and cost
Seamlessly scale IT using cloud storage
Reduce IT complexity and increase IT efficiency

The program will include:

Lunch
A $25 VISA Gift card for attending
An opportunity to meet our Development and Management Teams
Participation in a CloudArray workshop
A grand prize drawing (must be in attendance to win)

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…

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

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 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!