Blogs by Andres Rodriguez
The Best Backup is No Backup.
Rethinking backup in the era of the cloud
In the scale of miserable IT jobs, backup ranks up there with building a full rack of razor sharp 1Us. Backup is cumbersome, under-appreciated and you always end up bloody. (See my recent blog post on how RAIN architectures fall short for backups.) In addition to being complex and costly, backup puts a tremendous load on your servers and network as the data gets syphoned through the backup server.
Backup serves two critical purposes: making a copy of data outside the storage system you wish to protect and versioning everything so you can roll back unwanted changes. Many people…
Too Big to Backup
Data Protection in the Cloud
Amazon S3 is the largest public storage system in the world. In 2008, Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, estimated that S3 was storing 14 billion objects. By March 2010, that number had grown to 102 billion and some of our sources at Amazon tell us that the number will end up close to a trillion in 2011. These objects are the individual data assets that Amazon stores on behalf of its customers. The objects can be pictures, movie clips or, in the case of the Nasuni Filer, encrypted file chunks. If you assume an object-size of a megabyte results in a staggering 1 exabyte (1,000 petabytes) of storage capacity. This…
Designing a File System for the Cloud
Brewers’s CAP Theorem meets Eventual Consistency
In a technological world where everything seems possible, there are still those immutable laws that designers attempt to violate at their own peril. In July of 2000, Eric Brewer gave the keynote speech at the ACM Symposium on the Principles of Distributed Computing. To those of us working on distributed systems, it was a watershed moment when many of our suspicions and concerns about the design of really big systems were crystalized into something equivalent to the universal law of gravitation. Even before Newton defined his law, everyone experienced gravitation but couldn't…
Beyond the Allure of 3PAR - How Massive Data Growth is Transforming the Storage Industry
Almost a decade ago I ran into the 3PAR team at a trade show. I was there with my previous company, Archivas. We were showcasing the capabilities of our brand new object-store: the Archivas Storage Cluster. Based on the same distributed computing principles that had allowed companies like Amazon and Akamai to scale to petabytes, our system ran on inexpensive commodity hardware — Intel-compatible servers interconnected with plain Ethernet. The object-store was a pure software concept that still managed to scale gracefully from a terabyte to petabytes by self-organizing into larger and larger clusters. The 3PAR team was…
Strategies for Offsite Data Protection: Using Snapshots to Merge Backup and Archive in the Cloud
People are far more familiar with cloud storage than they think. Hundreds of millions of people regularly store their photos and videos in the cloud. Everytime someone posts a picture to Facebook, Flickr, or any social-networking or photo-sharing site, that photo is stored and protected in the cloud. The file is safely archived. This is a great use case for cloud storage - for reasons I'll detail below - but the cloud can be more than an archive. A snapshot-based cloud gateway can take advantage of the protection model of the cloud to transform its functionality for business.
Generally, people think of an archive as a structure or building, …Cloud Storage Security Challenge: The Free Software Foundation Wins
Today our first cloud storage challenge officially comes to an end. We're thrilled - but not surprised - to say that no one cracked the Nasuni Filer and revealed the contents of the encrypted prize file, which we left out for anyone to attack. As such, this security challenge successfully demonstrated that modern encryption can protect cloud storage files.
We were inspired to launch the contest in part because we understand the fears businesses have when it comes to storing data in the cloud. In fact we designed our system with these concerns in mind. The cloud storage security challenge was our way of both educating businesses about…
The Nasuni Blog Team
Today we made a change to our philosophy around our blogs and are now attributing the blog posts in the Nasuni blog to the actual primary authors. Previously we had the age-old enterprise mentality of "dont release any names unless they're designated talking heads". Now we’re pleased to introduce our great team of current bloggers:
Andres Rodriguez - CEO and co-founder, you can find my bio here. You'll see many blog posts focusing on overall company updates, customer stories, market direction, our value proposition and more.
Rob Mason - President and co-founder, you can find his bio here. You'll see many blog posts focused…
Cloud Storage Challenge: Security
Today we are announcing the first in a series of Cloud Storage Challenges. This first challenge centers on one of the main concerns people have with sending their data to the cloud: security. Businesses that would benefit significantly from using cloud storage are holding back due to fears of data leakage.
There is some validity to these concerns. The cloud is a multi-tenant environment. Resources are shared and the cloud itself is an outside party, so there’s a risk that your data could be vulnerable to an accident or a malicious hacker attack. At Nasuni, we designed our system with these and other potential concerns in mind. The Filer…Customer Story: Simple, Secure Backup
The full version of the Filer has only been out for a month, but we are already seeing a wide range of use cases. Last week, we discussed a consulting firm that plans to use the Filer to quickly and inexpensively set up secure, high-performance offices in remote locations. We are also seeing plenty of interest from schools and universities.
The education field is intriguing because they typically don’t have the budget of a big company, so they are very price sensitive, but they often have a huge number of clients – a typical university could have upwards of 10,000 students. Since the standard model for NAS pricing is on a per client basis, this…
RAIN: How the Cloud Protects Your Data
Protecting data is not simply a matter of keeping it secure. Resiliency is essential. Users need to be able to access data even in the event of a failure. To ensure this, cloud storage providers such as Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure use an architecture known as RAIN, or Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Nodes. We thought we would discuss the technique briefly because it reveals a great deal about the strengths and weaknesses of the cloud, and where the Nasuni Filer fits into the picture.
With RAIN architecture, independent servers in the cloud make complete copies of your data. This data is protected because it is copied…
