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Join Stephen Foskett for “The Deletion Dilemma”, Wednesday April 13

Deleting data is not as easy as many think!

Join Stephen Foskett of Foskett Services for the webcast, “The Deletion Dilemma” on Wednesday, April 13. Foskett will discuss the issues faced by today’s IT organizations when it comes time to delete data.

How should your organization deal with the issue of data deletion?

Suppose you are the IT manager of an organization and you have set up shares on network attached storage for your users. Now suppose your users delete their files as needed. Should the files be permanently deleted from your storage and backup medium?

The answer to this question is not a simple yes or no.

In most cases, best practices call for not deleting the file permanently. Any IT manager who has been in charge of storage infrastructure knows the most common storage problem is accidental deletions and “save over’s.  When a copy of the deleted file still exists, the accidentally deleted files can be recovered.  Nevertheless, keeping copies of deleted files can cost money and may pose other risks, such as legal liabilities.

In this webinar, storage expert, blogger and editor Stephen Foskett joins Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez to discuss the dilemma of deletion and the best practices around it. With many companies looking at the cloud to expand their storage infrastructure, simplify storage management and save money, questions arise as to whether or not cloud storage can offer these organizations the tools they need to properly handle deletions. Come and hear these two celebrated storage experts’ opinions and hear how Nasuni has solved the issue of data deletion in the cloud.

This webinar will be held on Wednesday, April 13 at 2:00 PM Eastern time. Register now!

Note: Nasuni is a client of Foskett Services. Although the content of this webinar was created independently, its production is part of a paid engagement.

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RtF1.4: Cloud Storage Objections

The first episode of Raising the Floor, the enterprise datacenter podcast from Foskett Services, features thought leaders from two key cloud storage-enabling companies:

  1. Josh Goldstein, VP of Marketing, Cirtas
  2. Andres Rodriguez, Founder and CEO, Nasuni

This discussion is moderated by Stephen Foskett, founder of Foskett Services.

We conclude our conversation by confronting some of the objections people have to cloud storage: Security, data protection, and performance.

Stephen: Now, not everybody’s onboard though obviously. There are easy objections that people have beyond cost. Cost is probably the first objection that people have but the second is security. There, I think that people are maybe looking at the wrong thing. I hear a lot that they’re worried about providers going out of business or having an outage or losing their data.

To me, I think a greater concern is what might happen to that data once it’s outside the walls of the datacenter. How do you answer that? Let’s start with Nasuni, how do you answer the security concern?

Andres: I think this fear goes back to the beginning of our conversation. Which is, one of the great benefits of the cloud is that it can be a multi-tenet environment. There are many people sharing the same infrastructure. This fear of data leakage or essentially what’s going to happen because I’m sharing infrastructure with other people. If I put my Social Security numbers of my employees up there in the cloud, can someone else hack into that and look at those Social Security numbers? That is the fear.

The fear is that private business information will somehow leak into the Internet because that’s where it’s being store. The way we like to address this is the cloud is for storage. A heck of a lot more secure than it’s ever been for either software as a service. Things like SalesForce.com or Cloud Compute.

That’s simply because, when your data is in your datacenter and when you have products like the Cirtas product or the Nasuni products, everything gets encrypted on your floor with your own encryption keys. Then, it leaves the datacenter encrypted already.

Those encryption keys are never seen by Nasuni. They do not have to be seen by your cloud provider. Therefore, your data in the cloud will be encrypted to this kind of top secret — it takes a million computers a million years to hack into AES 256 which is what we all like to use for this crypto, out there in the cloud.

Really, the fact that neither the provider nor the vendor, like we are, has to have your encryption keys give you an enormous edge. When you have all our customer information out there on SalesForce.com, their servers need to be able to see your data.

SalesForce has put in place very many good procedures to protect your data, but it’s procedure-based. When we do it, it’s really crypto-based. It’s the encryption itself is protecting your data. Because, no one else needs to see your data out there, to be able to make use of it.

So, cloud storage is very, very secure. Much more secure than things we’ve already been using for 10 years.

Stephen: I think that the other thing people are concerned about is performance. I think that this affects block storage especially, Josh. File applications are a little bit more tolerant of latency and the time it requires to access data. Block storage applications are much less tolerant of latency. Latency, of course, is the plague of the Internet. How do you address the latency question?

Josh: There’s several techniques that we use in our products to do this. Just by way of background, the technical heritage of a lot of the engineers who started our company comes from the WAN acceleration space. These are guys who have tackled this problem many times before and made lots of things work well over the Internet that were never designed to work over networks. It’s a core competency for our organization.

Specifically, things that we’re doing are protocol optimization out to the cloud. The de-duplication and compression algorithms that we use are part of this as well. By taking data and getting it down into as small a format as possible, you’re moving less information around so you can do it faster.

Finally, our system is delivered as a hardware based appliance. There’s a sizeable caching system on that that spans memory and SSD as well as spinning disks. What the system is doing is always looking at the data that you’re accessing and keeping those working sets of data local to the appliance where we can serve them with SAN levels of latency.

There’s only the occasional miss, a piece of information we do not have local on the appliance that we have to go and fetch from the cloud. That’s minimized quite a bit and we do this in our sizing of the caching system on the appliance to the workloads that we’re targeting.

Stephen: That’s great. I think that clearly the WAN acceleration market has demonstrated that it is possible to do things over the Internet that were seemingly impossible. The history of the last 10 years has demonstrated that it’s possible to do things over the Internet that nobody else thought possible. Here we are recording a call like this. I guess one final thing, one final thought. Is cloud storage a viable primary storage media or is it really, as people see it, as an alternative or secondary storage media. Is this a primary storage media?

You want to jump in there Andres?

Andres: I think this is a question of capability versus what people are comfortable with today. What Josh just talked about, is in my opinion, what defines this new generation of gateway or Ray products that are connecting the cloud to the datacenter. Here in Nasuni, the team here comes from the EMC symmetric’s caching side of the business. It’s all the same kind of thing where you have a lot of high-performance caching. Understanding how to cache a file system, such that, you can achieve the same thing that Josh was just talking about which is give me primarily performance in a way that I can make it indistinguishable from what I’m using today.

If you don’t do that then, it gets complicated. I now have to think of what is appropriate to tier to the cloud and what I can keep in my data center. I’m not claiming that businesses in general are ready to put everything out there on the cloud, yet. The capability’s there.

I think what we lack a lot of is not just comfort but, awareness. People have been using the cloud for online backup for many years now, or cloud-like systems, like Mozy and Carbonite and things like that.

Now, you can go one step closer to something that’s really, really useful. You can put a primary file server and you can connect your users on it. Your users will not know that they’re taking it from the cloud.

You can bring in something like Exchange or something like SharePoint and plug it in front of a Cirtas box and the users won’t know the difference. That is the goal of this new generation of connector products, un-ramping products to the cloud.

It’s really to blur the distinction between cloud users and local users for storage.

Stephen: I think that’s really exciting. I want to thank you guys for joining me today for this “Raising the Floor” podcast. Josh Goldstein from Cirtas, thank you very much for joining us.

Josh: Thank you Stephen, and thank you Andres, it was a pleasure.

Stephen: Yes, and thank you Andres, Andres Rodriguez from Nasuni.


Watch this feed at Foskett Services (or subscribe via email) for the rest of this discussion!

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RtF1.3: Data Protection, Automatic Provisioning, and Storage Management

The first episode of Raising the Floor, the enterprise datacenter podcast from Foskett Services, features thought leaders from two key cloud storage-enabling companies:

  1. Josh Goldstein, VP of Marketing, Cirtas
  2. Andres Rodriguez, Founder and CEO, Nasuni

This discussion is moderated by Stephen Foskett, founder of Foskett Services.

We continue our conversation talking about some of the advanced features of cloud storage gateways: Data protection with snapshots, automatic provisioning, and easier storage management.

Stephen: So you are tackling the file related issues and Josh, I understand that Cirtas is tackling the issues related to block storage. Now, I think that’s actually a different kind of jump than file systems.

Josh: There is some things that are different and there’s a lot of things that are the same. So, in our case, what we are doing is presenting a standard iSCSI target so that you access are going to revert iSCSI block protocols. And the way you interact with the system would be very much familiar to you from using any other iSCSI storage array. So, you would go in provision volumes, everything is still provision. So, you can expose to your observers whatever capacity you would like without that happening any corresponding charge in the cloud other than what you are actually writing in per data.

So, as an example, I can give a server a five terabyte volume to use very easily and from the operating systems perspective on that server, he has five terabytes and disk space but you have not been charge to send by your cloud provider by provisioning that volume. It’s only going to be based on what you actually write into it.

And then again, as Andres mentioned; and this is very important in this world, you want to look at only the deltas of information coming in as far as what’s going up to the cloud. So this system needs to be able to de-duplicate and compress information as well as to version it.

And in our case we, like Nasuni does; take snapshots of data on each volume at user defined intervals. So this gives you logical data protections layer that overlays on top of the physical data protection you’re getting from the cloud providers.

Those two things together are why you don’t need to do separate backups when you’re using these systems as primary data stores. The protection that is inherent in backups is just there for you automatically without having to run the backup process.

Stephen: Yeah because you’re using snapshot technology as an alternative data protection method.

Josh: That’s exactly right. So the two elements of data protection are going to come down to physical data protection, in other words, what do I do if the driver or site fails? That’s what the cloud providers are doing. And then there is the logical data protection, which is what do I do if somebody deletes a file they care about? Or we get a virus and it causes a problem, database gets corrupted? In those kinds of events you’re going to do a logical rollback even though the underlying storage system hasn’t had any physical problems to it.

Stephen: So that is where snapshotting technology is critical?

Andres: Stephen, one thing I want to add to Josh’s comment. So when he mentioned the ability to provision say a five terabyte volume, but your paying for as much as you get in the cloud. One of the really interesting things about that is that Josh is essentially describing thin provisioning in the classic sense. But unlike doing thin provisioning and this is the cloud is automatically provisioned. So he is essentially provisioning the volume. But then the volume is growing gradually, smoothly without any administrative interference. Without you having to worry about it; the volume is filling in its data as it goes. And that is one of the things we talked about in the beginning.

The cloud really allows you to build a different type of storage system, because automatic provisioning is really thin provisioning should be but isn’t. When you’re talking about physical linked arrays that are limited by actual hard drives, you know, running, spindles running in your datacenter.

Stephen: Yeah, that’s one of the items that I am trying to basically get across to the world. Cloud storage is the next generation of thin provisioning. It’s this automatic provisioning, this idea that as I need storage I get it and as I stop needing it I don’t have to pay for it anymore. And that is really revolutionary; I mean that’s a really totally new thing. Does that give you the kind of economics that people want from storage though? I mean, is de-duplication and automatic provisioning, is that enough to justify the cost of cloud storage. When you can go to a store and spend a hundred dollars and get a terabyte of disk storage?

Andres: So you’re never going to be able to compete with Best Buy drives. They’re cheaper; the cloud is more expensive than that. If you look at the Amazon costs by themselves, you’re going to be looking at about five dollars per gigabyte over a three-year period. That is very, very close to the cost of primary storage array technology. If you were talking about a left-hand or an ecological array, you would be talking in that range. Now what is interesting about the cloud is even if you are paying about the same amount for the primary piece, the load that you are taking off the protection environment. Everything that you have behind that to protect that storage. Whether it’s a second site, whether its your backup server and targeting say, some data domain or some data de-duplication box in the backup stream. That what gets above simpler because now you’re relying on the cloud for doing all of that work.

So I think when looking at the cloud for cost, it’s very important to not just stop at the hard drive or primary cost level and really try to look at your cost as it ripples through your environment for protection.

Stephen: Because there’s even more than data protection as well. You have to think about storage management and planning and migration forward. That’s another thing I think people often overlook is the fact that you can freely migrate forward using cloud storage because there is no migration. It just exists and when things are updated, they’re updated and you just never even know it. You don’t even notice that things are happening.

Josh: What Nasuni and Cirtas are addressing are all of those things. It’s not just the capacity in giving you inexpensive capacity. But it’s making the whole cost of your data life cycle with really solid data protection and really solid disaster recovery. Something completely viable that you can do with the cloud. So, in our case, you’re going to be able to store data. That data is going to be protected in the same way as if it had been backed up but you’re not going to have the costs of developing those backup systems.

You’re also not going to have the costs of building out and maintaining a disaster recovery site in the traditional sense where you would have synchronous or asynchronous replication to a remote array.

Once your data is in the cloud, it’s accessible from anywhere on the Internet. So, if there is some kind of disaster and you need to recover straight out of the cloud, that’s perfectly doable from any location. The need to have very expensive disaster recovery processes is changed dramatically by leveraging cloud technology.


Watch this feed at Foskett Services (or subscribe via email) for the rest of this discussion!

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RtF1.2: How Can Conventional Applications Access Cloud Storage?

The first episode of Raising the Floor, the enterprise datacenter podcast from Foskett Services, features thought leaders from two key cloud storage-enabling companies:

  1. Josh Goldstein, VP of Marketing, Cirtas
  2. Andres Rodriguez, Founder and CEO, Nasuni

This discussion is moderated by Stephen Foskett, founder of Foskett Services.

We continue our conversation with a discussion of the mechanics of cloud storage. How can real-world applications make use of storage connected over the Internet?

Stephen Foskett: That’s one thing that’s interesting is that the cloud storage is not just conventional storage. There’s actually a very different architecture behind it as you mentioned in terms of how it’s actually constructed. There’s also the fact that the access method is very different. That maybe something we should talk about as well. Andres, do you want to take a moment to talk about object storage and REST?

Andres Rodriguez: Absolutely, and I should say before Nasuni, I actually did a company called Archivas to develop an object store. What we did there is the concept is rather than having block level read/write fast access, you develop a system that’s going to have blob level. That is much larger binaries, typically, at least a few hundred kilobytes in size. The binaries are accessed into the cluster, into the object store in a transactional way. Just like HTTP, in a file transfer way. What you have is this system that exists out there that you can access through essentially HTTP, get, could, and delete which are very gross operations, very high-level operations.

You’re going to be putting out all these binaries into those systems. What is important to understand those systems, not only do you have the latency’s built into protocols like that that are really designed to be accessed to be used over the Wide Area Network.

But, the semantics at the other end are such that those are protocols that are very good if you want to create a blob, get a blob back, or delete it, but not if you want to modify it.

Now, if we’re talking in terms of trying to make that compatible with file systems, there’s a real leap that you have to take so that you can have something that is read/write very fast coexist with that kind of backend.

Stephen: Yes, and I think that that’s really the next point we need to make. Most conventional applications are not compatible with this HTTP REST interface that most public cloud providers rely on. Now, there are more applications all the time that are compatible with it but does this mean that cloud is off-limits that you can’t use it for conventional applications?

Josh Goldstein: Not at all. I think that the thing is you need a technology and this is exactly that the business that Nasuni sort have gone into. You need a technology to pry in the cloud to make it appear the same way that you would expect your local storage systems to appear. And that is what’s really critical is laying this on top of the object store so that you get the best of both worlds. You are now getting the scalability and the pay as you go pricing that you can get from a number of different public cloud providers but at the same time you are in and out reading with that cloud in a way that is very familiar to you and compatible with your applications.

Stephen: I think that is one of the interesting things about these two companies. And one of the reasons that I picked you guys to talk together is because I see you guys as basically two sides of a coin. You have block storage and you have files storage. Do you want to talk a little bit each of you about what it is exactly that you are doing with public clouds storage?

Andres: Sure thing. So, I’ll start there and I said anything that traditional storage world, we have file based systems. We have block based systems and that is exactly where Cirtas and Nasuni stand. We are the equivalent of say a company named EMC and NetApp for the cloud world. The approaches are complimentary. And they are both trying to solve the same problem. I’ll start on the file side but Josh can take on the block. But on the file level is really, look, if you want to have something that behaves very much like a file server, say like a NetApp box. It means you are going to have a file system, you want to have a protocol to export it locally on so something like CIFS, you are now going to have access to directory integration so that you can have access control. This is what makes a file server useful in the datacenter.

And furthermore, remember what I said about no backups? If you are not… If the cloud is completely reliable right. Then what you need to have on top of the cloud is some kind of system that allows you to version all the changes out to the cloud. And you want to do that for several reasons.

But one of the most important reasons is so you can go back to your file system as it was at any point in time or any specific file or directory at any point of time. And we’ll store it without having to go to back up by just relying on this device. In our case, on our Nasuni file server and the cloud back-end.

In addition to that and I let Josh kind of paint the full picture from the block perspective.

You also want to use this kind of snapshotting technology to make sure that you are only sending to the cloud and storing in the cloud because you are now going to be paying for this for the changes or the minimum amount of information but you can’t. And so you want to do a very good job identifying any kind of duplication of the data.

And then de-duplicate that data, compressing that data and incorporating all of that data before it lands in the cloud. We can talk afterwards about security and encryption but that’s really what makes the bridge. I’m skipping the file system side.


Watch this feed at Foskett Services (or subscribe via email) for the rest of this discussion!

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RtF1.1: What Is Cloud Storage?

The first episode of Raising the Floor, the enterprise datacenter podcast from Foskett Services, features thought leaders from two key cloud storage-enabling companies:

  1. Josh Goldstein, VP of Marketing, Cirtas
  2. Andres Rodriguez, Founder and CEO, Nasuni

This discussion is moderated by Stephen Foskett, founder of Foskett Services.

We begin the conversation with a discussion of the general nature of cloud storage:

Stephen Foskett: Personally, I’ve been involved in cloud storage for quite a while. As both of you know, I worked for Nirvanix for a year, and even though I’m no longer there, I continue to be intrigued by the possibilities. Years and years ago, I was at StorageNetworks, which was one of the first managed storage providers as well, and ever since then I’ve seen that this is an idea that could work for the enterprise. So let’s talk a little bit about this. Let’s talk about the differences between managed storage services and cloud. What exactly is cloud storage? What makes it cloudy? What makes it something different than just conventional storage? Do you want to take that Andres?

Andres Rodriguez: Sure thing. The cloud is, first of all, a very large, very reliable multi-tenant environment. It is an environment where you’re going to be leveraging economies of scale, be able to operate things at a very, very large-scale, and share it among many, many users that are going to have a much higher quality of service than they would have if they were just deploying a small piece of infrastructure.

Stephen: Yes, because they have the economy of scale not just of the equipment, but also, the management resources. And one of the things that struck me was that at StorageNetworks, for example, and at Nirvanix, I found that these folks really focused on doing one thing well. They didn’t focus on doing everything. They weren’t generalists. They were very focused on a specific infrastructure, and I think that’s something that gets overlooked often.

Andres: That’s right. And I think one of the things that hurt StorageNetworks at the time was the fact that they couldn’t deploy the equipment in an efficient, multi-tenant way. And so, if you look at the new cloud architectures, (places like Nirvanix, places like Amazon) those systems are designed from the get-go to be shared among many, many users, and make very efficient use of the equipment and the software running it across that user base.

Stephen: Josh, what do you have to add? Are there any other characteristics that make storage cloudy versus conventional?

Josh Goldstein: Yes. I think the other main characteristic that you would see is the way that you are charged for the storage. So with cloud storage providers, you don’t have to pre-buy the amount of capacity that you intend to use up front. Everything is built pay-as-you-go, and the rates are usually extremely low compared to what you would be paying to buy storage to house in your own facility. So essentially, you get 100% utilization of the storage all the time. You’re never going to have a spare gigabyte in the cloud that isn’t being taken up by data that you put there.

Stephen: I think another thing that people often overlook is that you’re just buying what you pay for. Now enterprises might get a different model. They might buy a flat rate instead of this pay-as-you-go model. But a lot of people have said that cloud is just a business model. Is cloud a business model, or is it something more?

Andres: I think it’s something more. For instance, let’s look at one of the aspects. The systems are designed to scale in massive ways. So take capacity. if you have a system in the backend that can have only minute capacity that means that you can now design a storage system to utilize that endless capacity. Such that you never have to migrate data from one place to another because you’ve run out of capacity, which is one of the most common reasons why people have to migrate things from one site to another. So the characteristics of the storage system that you can build using cloud (and that’s just one of the attributes) really can change dramatically.

If you take reliability, the cloud architectures all make copies of your data across datacenters, across servers. Their guarantee to you is that your data will never be lost and you don’t need to back it up yourself.

If you can inherit those characteristics in a storage system that is useful in your datacenter as a business, that means you no longer have to back up your data.

Stephen: Well, I’m not sure everybody’s going to jump on that band wagon and not backup their data. I think a lot of folks might not feel comfortable not backing up data.

Andres: That’s right. There may be a process at the transition. It’s the same thing as keeping a power generator running or available next to your business because you’re still afraid that the electric grid may fail. That may be true for a while. Then, after a while, you just think having all that machinery around doesn’t really make sense.

Stephen: Yes, take that Josh. Is cloud more than just storage? Is cloud storage more than just storage capacity?

Josh: It’s definitely more than storage capacity. I think the thing that most people don’t really understand these days is how the cloud from reputable providers is architected under the covers. It’s not just that your data is going up and sitting on a version of the storage array that you would have in your own datacenter but it’s just sitting somewhere else. That was the way things were done 10 years ago when people first got into this business model.

Today, the cloud is built on top of process that are very difficult for most companies to replicate on their on. So, the price you’re paying to your cloud provider includes not just storing your data but also keeping multiple replicas of that data spread across different geographical sites.

You’re highly protected against not only a disk drive failure, but also an entire array failure or even an entire site failure where your information’s still is survived those kinds of events and is remaining accessible to your when you need it.

That’s something that for most organizations to engineer that level of reliability is extremely expensive and difficult for them. The cloud providers have been able to do that at scale and still deliver the capacity to you with that type of protection at a price point that’s really pretty amazing.


Watch this feed at Foskett Services (or subscribe via email) for the rest of this discussion!

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Raising the Floor 1: Cloud Storage Gateways

The first episode of Raising the Floor, the enterprise datacenter podcast from Foskett Services, features thought leaders from two key cloud storage-enabling companies:

  1. Josh Goldstein, VP of Marketing, Cirtas
  2. Andres Rodriguez, Founder and CEO, Nasuni

This discussion is moderated by Stephen Foskett, founder of Foskett Services.

Nasuni and Cirtas produce storage appliances that act as gateways to public cloud storage services like Amazon’s S3. Both gateways enable conventional applications to access cloud storage without the extensive modifications sometimes required.

Although similar in concept, these products differ in that Cirtas presents a block storage interface while Nasuni acts as a network-attached storage file server. Each is appropriate for different applications, but both can be used as a gateway for production applications as well as the archiving and content distribution normally associated with cloud storage.

Watch the video now, subscribe to the text feed or to the podcast in iTunes! We will be posting a transcript of the discussion at Foskett Services as well.

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