As organizations seek to take advantages of new storage paradigm, found in Cloud Storage, they are also concerned of the major challenges posed by this new opportunity. Vendors globally are putting best effort to address these challenges with their own advanced technology and architecture, but yet to reach the destination.

Undoubtedly cloud storage is a hot topic in current IT discussion. A quick Google search on cloud storage reveals an increasing level of market competition in this space. As companies rapidly develop new technologies and practices to deliver on the promise of “the cloud”, the infrastructure surrounding the cloud architecture needs to quickly evolve to provide options for service and support. Many of the gaps in this infrastructure that have inhibited storage-as-a-service concepts from  gaining traction are now being filled by more robust, creative solutions from several companies. By targeting these gaps in the cloud infrastructure, vendors are trying to provide tangible capital and operational cost savings by integrating technology that allows seamless transition to a cloud storage model.

Cloud storage provides a variable cost, pay-as-you-go acquisition model that scales dynamically right along with the data pool. When utilizing cloud storage, there is no longer any need to purchase storage in large chunks. Companies pay only for what they need when they need it, taking advantage of the expected price declines in storage capacity costs over time. Furthermore, contracts with storage service providers (SSPs) are typically viewed as operating expense (OpEx) versus capital expense (CapEx). Converting large pools of archived storage from CapEx to OpEx can have significant positive benefits to companies’ bottom line. The cost savings equation is one of the primary benefits of cloud storage.

Major Benefits of Cloud Storage

Almost all Cloud Storage Software is built to address the needs of emerging markets while being able to scale to hundreds of nodes in a loosely coupled architecture similar to the google file system. Advanced solutions do not require custom or dedicated hardware and can leverage existing IP networking interconnections.

Advanced solutions run in user space which provides many advantages, including the familiarity of a standard Linux environment, freedom of hardware selection, co-residency with other applications, simplified installation and management and removal of custom kernel requirements.
Some of the key benefits of using cloud storage and of applications that take advantage of storage in the cloud are mentioned below:

• Disaster preparedness – Off site storage isn’t new. Keeping important data backed up off site has been the foundation of disaster recovery since the inception of the tape drive. Cloud storage services not only keep your data off premise, but they also make their living at ensuring that they have redundancy and systems in place for disaster recovery.

• Lower impact outages and upgrades – Typically cloud computing provides cost effective redundancies in storage hardware. This translates into uninterrupted service during a planned or unplanned outage. This is also true for hardware upgrades which for the end user will no longer be visible.

• Simplified planning – Cloud storage solutions free the IT manager from detailed capacity planning. Cloud-based solutions are flexible and provide storage as needed. This eliminates the need to over provision for storage that may be needed to meet capacities in the future.

• Cost effectiveness – For total cost of ownership, cloud storage is a clear winner. Elimination of the costly systems and the people required to maintain them typically provides organizations with significant cost savings that more than offset the fees for cloud storage. The costs of being able to provide high levels of availability and the scalability an organization needs are also unmatched. The economies of scale achieved by data centers simply can’t be matched by all but the very largest of organizations.

• Ease of management – This is one of the primary advantages of cloud storage solutions. The maintenance of the software, hardware and general infrastructure to support storage is drastically simplified by an application in the cloud. Applications that take advantage of storage in the cloud are often far easier to set up and maintain than deploying an equivalent service on premise. At the customer site, often all that is needed to manage your storage implementation is a simple web browser leaving the headaches to the service provider.

Meeting Challenges

The buzz created by cloud storage vendors and venture capitalists is slowly gaining momentum as certain benefits of the strategy become clearer: pay-as-you-go pricing, OPEX versus CAPEX, reduction of hardware, etc. However, skeptics point to the big picture of total cost of ownership (TCO), which includes aspects of which enterprise customers are more wary. Data security, availability and questions of ownership are all things that keep the CIO awake at night, making him or her reluctant to place his or her company’s data in the hands of a third-party vendor. Not to mention perhaps the biggest challenge, integration of cloud storage into their existing infrastructure. Each of these issues is worthy of further discussion.

Data Security

When data is kept within the confines of a data center, there are recognized methods for ensuring that it is kept safe. When moving data outside of the data center, as is the case with public cloud storage, security concerns become a top priority. A key to improving both security and availability issues is the incorporation of an information dispersal algorithm (IDA). The class of IDA algorithms was first explored by Michael Rabin for security and fault tolerance of data distribution. The IDA (after encryption) splits data into a configurable number of slices that include error correcting codes, with those slices dispersing to a number of storage endpoints. Individual slices are not useful by themselves to exploit the original data. IDA also tolerates loss or corruption of slices, allowing reconstruction of the original data from a predefined number of slices.

IDA combined with current encryption technology provides additional security for data stored in the cloud. Because data objects are sliced up and dispersed using IDA, even a security breach at a cloud SSP where the encryption keys are compromised is less likely to yield useful data to the intruder. To make use of the data in the cloud, a hacker or SSP employee would have to also gain access to a quorum of the data slices
stored elsewhere. Assuming that the data is dispersed across multiple SSPs that are different companies, this is unlikely. IDA works seamlessly with database encryption, host-based storage security, or self encrypting disk drives providing an additional layer of security. Additionally, this increased level of data protection for cloud environments is achieved without additional security management overhead.

Availability

Even the most sophisticated data centers in the world experience outages, and this holds true for cloud SSPs as well. Unfortunately for the industry, several outages of public cloud vendors have been publicized and somewhat sensationalized lately. That’s the nature of being a public provider of a service, whereas a data center outage, within the walls of any Fortune 1000 company, is unlikely to be publicized in the same way.

Nevertheless, outages do happen, and Murphy’s Law ensures that they will happen at the worst possible time. Remember, the data most likely to be stored in the cloud is cold archive data, so the likelihood of it needing to be retrieved urgently is low. But rest assured that there will be cases where an archived object will need to be retrieved at the exact moment that the cloud SSP is unavailable for some reason.

Again, this is where IDA provides an interesting solution. Using IDA, the data objects will have been sliced and dispersed to multiple cloud vendors, and an outage at one SSP is unlikely to also affect the others, so the object can be reconstructed using the data stored at the SSPs that remain active and the user need not worry about—or even know—that one SSP was down. Dispersing data across multiple SSPs is the best—and possibly only—way to achieve a level of service from cloud storage that approaches the five 9s that data center CIOs expect. (A side benefit here is that now there is no pressure on SSPs to offer the
five 9 SLA, which will keep costs of the service lower.)

Data Ownership

One final argument for IDA is data ownership. With data objects dispersed across multiple cloud SSPs, no single SSP has a complete data set. If the relationship between the user and the SSP ends for whatever reason, the CIO need not worry that the SSP followed through on their commitment to delete the data because it is incomplete and unusable to anyone.

Integration into the Data Center

Integrating the new cloud storage paradigm into the proven, hardened and trusted IT infrastructure may be the most difficult challenge out of all of those mentioned here. While there is simply no way to gain the advantages of cloud storage without some additional work (no free lunch), there must be a method for adding a cloud storage tier with minimal disruption to existing IT processes and procedures. Many would say that simply adding an agent to an existing server, providing access to the cloud, is enough. True, this does provide access for the data center to cloud storage, but it also introduces new worries, such as dealing with cloud APIs, and being locked into a single cloud SSP. This method may work well for the small business customer, but will not be attractive to the enterprise.

Conclusion

The debate continues regarding the role of storage cloud in the enterprise. Will customers utilize public cloud providers, build elastic data stores in-house via private clouds or will there be a combination of both approaches, sometimes called a hybrid cloud? Regardless of how these questions are ultimately answered, one thing seems clear: there are attractive business drivers to adoption of elastic storage and enterprise customers are anxious for the storage industry to dissolve the technological barriers that are preventing them from taking full advantage of what these technologies have to offer.

By: ‘InfoStore’ Bureau