A storm is starting to develop around the issue of vendor lock-in, or the idea that transferring data between clouds is all but impossible. Yes, there are several new and exciting providers, and these players should foster competition and drive down the price of storing data. But in most cases, the clouds make it too difficult to jump from one to another, so if you are already storing your data with one cloud, you are effectively stuck. Better prices at another provider mean nothing.
Vint Cerf and others have suggested that the market won’t really take off until the clouds address this issue and make it easier for customers to move from one service to another. ReadWriteEnterprise summarized the issue recently, citing a presentation by two senior engineers at Yahoo! and Facebook who called for cloud peering agreements, open APIs, better infrastructure, and more.
The lock-in problem is disappointing in part because one of the most exciting things about storage as a service is that it has the potential to give customers real choice. With traditional storage arrays, this is just not the case. Once you commit to a product from a particular vendor, you are wed to that vendor. The cost of switching to something new is prohibitive.
While the cloud does have the potential to deliver real options, it is not there yet. There is no absolutely painless solution for switching from one provider to another.
Some have suggested that an arbitrage style system would be a good way to take advantage of this competition, but we’ve argued before that it doesn’t make sense to disperse your data widely, based on the best price. You should be able to retain control over your data – letting an algorithm spread it between different clouds doesn’t make sense. Instead, we think that migration tools, support for moving data in bulk between providers, and common APIs are the way to go. Here at Nasuni, we have actually integrated to a dozen different APIs already.
We have also worked to make the migration process easier so that our customers can benefit from new clouds. Yesterday we announced our new partnership with Rackspace Hosting, which means that new customers now have the option of choosing between four different storage providers. The difference with our technology, though, is that it allows our existing clients to take advantage of Rackspace, too.
With the Nasuni Filer, customers can migrate data from one cloud to another through a standard file system interface. It’s just a matter of drag and drop. We absorb the bandwidth charges – one of the impediments to transfers in the wider market – so that our customers can switch clouds without paying extra. We know that many of our customers are working on tight or even shrinking IT budgets, so we do our best to save them money wherever possible.
Is this the end of the story? No. But even as the clouds are still evolving we're providing real solutions to the challenges around cloud storage today so that our customers can take advantage of its benefits.
Questions? Email us at feedback@nasuni.com.