Last week was another busy one for cloud storage. Some are touting 2010 as the year that cloud storage will really come into its own as a business solution—here are seven good reasons to make the jump. And here’s another article on why it’s time to take the cloud seriously. In short, we agree. This is the time for cloud storage. For all the potential benefits, though, there are still concerns, including worries about security and reliability. The Filer overcomes these potential weaknesses through strong security and a rigorous testing program.
Now on to the news. The big announcement last week was the introduction of yet another large cloud provider.
Verizon/IBM Cloud
Following AT&T’s Synaptic, Verizon has now entered the space, teaming with IBM to offer a new product called Managed Data Vault. For now the service will be limited to customers in the New York Metropolitan area, and we don’t yet have all the details on what it will offer. One article notes that the companies did not mention deduplication, local data caching, or how the service might deliver LAN speed over WAN distances.
But that’s the beauty of the Nasuni Filer. The new clouds—whether you’re talking about Synaptic or Managed Data Vault—don’t need to offer these features if you use the Filer as your gateway. The Filer delivers all this on its own. In a way, we’re in the business of making these clouds look good, so we always welcome new ones.
NAS Evolution
We were happy to see Nasuni mentioned in a nice SearchStorage piece on how NAS systems are changing to accomodate unstructured data growth. Look for us in the section on Cloud NAS, but remember, that’s not all we are. The Filer is a hybrid, Storage 2.0 offering that spans the divide between local, reliant storage and the unlimited cloud.
Unstructured data growth isn’t going to ease up, as one expert notes in the article, so scalability is going to continue to be a critical feature. Since the Filer is backed by unlimited clouds, our appliance is very, very scaleable. Insanely so.
Thin-Aware Provisioning
Normal storage has to be smart. You have a finite amount of space and it needs to be used wisely because it’s not easy to expand. This article makes the point that thin provisioning is basically a requirement these days, but thin provisioning eventually demands more disk space or bad things can happen to your array. The benefit of cloud storage is that there is unlimited disk space and customers only pay for what they actually need. The Nasuni Filer combines thin provisioning with the unlimited storage in the cloud, making the provisioning process completely automatic.
Archiving Options
SearchDataBackup discusses the importance of data archiving, and presents three possible archiving options for companies: disk, tape, or both. We’d argue that there is a fourth, of course. The Nasuni Filer and its access to unlimited cloud storage.
Those are the latest highlights. Check back again soon, as we’re hoping to make this news roundup a semi-regular feature.