Cloud Storage Channel Feature

StorSimple Tackles Five More Pressing Cloud Storage Questions

By Carrie Schmelkin
TMCnet Web Editor

Recently, Dr. Ian Howells, chief marketing officer of StorSimple, a leading provider of cloud storage solutions, sat down with TMCnet to discuss the cloud and cloud storage – two of the most talked about topics today. Howells answered five questions about the cloud that still eludes even the most well-versed in the cloud industry today.

Today, Howells will continue that discussion, touching on five more questions surrounding the ever-complex world of the cloud.

TMCnet: We already tackled five of the most pressing cloud questions, but here are a few more. How does an individual get performance for his/her applications when he/she goes over a WAN to access storage?

Howells: When it comes to the cloud, “content communism” doesn’t work.

You can't treat all content the same way. You need to think like Bing or Google (News - Alert); otherwise your CapEx and OpEx with rise exponentially with the volumes of content. If search engines treated every webpage equally, the page you want could be on Page 1 or 20 of the results – and that would be useless. Web companies have learned to rank each page automatically and display them by Page Rank. Also, this ranking needs to be done automatically without human beings manually categorizing the content. We need an equivalent BlockRank for content, to place the blocks of content that people want to access most on fast local drives and the blocks people have not accessed for some time to be automatically tiered to cloud storage. This approach means the working set of content that people are regularly accessing is fetched from SSD for the vast majority of the time.

TMCnet: What about backup? How do individuals back up large volumes to the cloud? Is this really practical?

Howells: You can’t treat the cloud as a big dumb disk at the end of a WAN. If you do it will be a disappointing experience, particularly if you are dumb about backup. If the content volume is spanning SSD, SAS (News - Alert) and cloud storage, it will be common for the majority of content to already be tiered into the cloud – potentially in an active archive. A cloud snapshot, where all of the volume is backed up to the cloud, does not have to move content that is already tiered into the cloud, to the cloud again. Only the content that is only on the appliance has to be (deduplicated, compressed and encrypted and then) moved to the cloud with WAN optimization.

For the second or any subsequent cloud snapshot, only the changed blocks from the appliance need to be moved to the cloud. This is a tiny percentage of the volume. Therefore, large multi-terabyte volumes can be simply and rapidly backed up to offsite cloud storage.

We focus on offering the best-of-both worlds: the instant restore of local snapshots with the data protection of cloud snapshots.

TMCnet: What about security?

Howells: Security breaches typically happen when human beings get access to unencrypted data. When you extend storage of unencrypted data to the cloud you are effectively extending the potential access to people not employed by your company or your company's policies.

Hybrid cloud storage appliances, such as StorSimple, are installed on your internal network and appear as an iSCSI drive. All blocks sent to the cloud tier are deduplicated, compressed and have AES 256 encryption applied to them. Therefore the access by people not employed by your company is against block level, deduplicated, compressed data with military grade encryption applied to it.

What is as important is key management. There is no point encrypting all cloud data if you give away access to the key to decrypt the data to people not employed by your company. That is analogous to locking your house and giving strangers (non-employees) access to the key.

TMCnet: Keeping my applications on-premises and tiering my cold content and snapshots into the cloud seems like a logical first step to cloud computing. What next?

Howells: Big content will flow into the cloud from existing on-premises stacks and existing on-premises applications. Big content does not move anywhere as easily as virtual machines.

Virtualization vendors pioneered the efficient movement of whole virtual machines. Just as smaller planets circle larger ones, the massive gravitational pull of Big Content will draw nimble virtual machines to move toward the content and the cloud provider that manages that content. The infrastructures that manage “Big Content” will use it to control the compute that accesses it either directly, in a hybrid architecture or for Disaster Recovery.