Friday, April 9, 2010

Collaboration, especially involving a common archived data set with read-heavy (reference data) interaction, is a strong fit with the benefits provided by cloud storage. Cloud systems can combine the ability for shared access, a scalable number of participating users, and ease of use with the advanced data storage features that an historic archive system requires. A lifespan in decades for some industries and the ‘always on’ duty cycle of global users, require these storage systems to maintain high data availability and long-term data preservation. Cloud storage can provide these features as well.

Examples in the Medical Industry

With the need to share a large, reference-based data set across a geographically dispersed user base, the move to electronic medical records is pushing the medical industry to consider cloud technology. Doctors, technicians, and medical facility operators require access to a patient’s medical records history. PACS systems, in place at most hospitals and medical imaging facilities, generate a very large amount of data that ideally should be available to multiple physical locations.

A centralized data store with access points available over the internet is now fairly common in the medical imaging industry. Large imaging vendors that have historically provided imaging systems to individual facilities have integrated special technologies into these systems to make them function ‘in the cloud’. The results are systems with distributed architectures and physically dispersed data sets that act as one large archive supporting an almost unlimited user base over the internet.

As a use case, the medical industry’s adoption of cloud storage systems for sharing electronic medical records and imaging was driven by an inability of existing technologies to effectively provide the shared access mandated by industry regulations. Previous infrastructures couldn’t provide the coordination and synchronization of the silos of data at individual medical facilities cost-effectively. Similarly, other industries have needs for collaboration that could be met by technologies similar to the cloud storage solutions used by the medical industry. But without regulations driving their adoption, cloud systems need to be able to show strong ROI numbers to justify their consideration.

Why the Cloud

To support collaboration, a cloud data infrastructure should be able to provide location-independent shared access to users, like systems integrated with Bycast StorageGRID®. Perhaps the most prominent feature of a cloud storage system is its ability to provide access essentially anywhere the internet is available. With a standard broadband connection a user can download, read, and modify a common set of files. This ability to simply store and widely distribute data objects of almost,any size is perhaps the fundamental advantage cloud architectures have over former methods, such as multiple site replication and file transfer technologies.

A shared data repository should also be able to grow as needed for the data set it contains. For many applications, this data would include large, high resolution image files demanded in these industries. Cloud storage systems offer a unique ability to grow almost without limit, compared with systems resident in traditional data centers. Aside from simply adding capacity the cloud’s ability to grow also includes adding user locations and new tiers of storage.

When data is stored in the cloud, some of these distributed archive systems can create a unique identifier for each block or ‘data object’, which becomes part of the metadata index that’s shared across all locations. These data objects can then be replicated to other locations to support data protection policies. When a file is needed, the requesting location uses its local metadata index to determine the best physical location from which to access the needed objects. Also, retrieval times can be minimized by streaming data objects as they become available, instead of waiting until the entire requested file or data set is retrieved.

As an archive, often containing personal or other sensitive data, a system that supports multiple user collaboration, should also include technologies that ensure data availability, integrity, and reliability. The unique identifiers act like fingerprints and enable the system to check data integrity at different times during the storage and retrieval process. Also, most systems include data encryption.

Digital Media

Historically, organizations have put employees in the same physical locations to enable them to work together on projects. This could be called ‘bringing people to their work’. Through collaboration technology, this paradigm could be shifted to ‘bringing their work to people’. In industries like digital media production, large numbers of specialized people work on a common data set, such as a motion picture. With an effective ‘global collaboration’ technology infrastructure, the data subset each person needs could be delivered to them, regardless of where they worked. This ‘content production sharing’ can enable the different people who create, modify and distribute content to access the same asset as it works its way through the production process. Given the availability and cost of this highly specialized workforce, the location independence these collaborative systems provide can be a significant benefit. Outsourcing to other parts of the globe can greatly increase the potential labor force, as well as give local talent the option of working independently.

Remote Sensing

Industries that collect, manage, and consume satellite and aerial imaging data are another example of environments that practice remote collaboration. Data sets from these primary sources are typically stored in raw formats, and then sold to user companies or organizations that will analyze, store, reanalyze, and archive the processed data sets. At the same time, others view these processed images from different locations over extended periods of time. Intelligence data, as an example, is often prepared and stored at a central location and then accessed by others at multiple locations. A cloud-based infrastructure can enable the collaboration of geographically distributed workers on these large file-size data sets, easily.

Cloud storage has a number of strong value propositions that are driving its adoption in several different business models. One of the most unique values is its ability to support remote collaboration using a large archive of reference data. Technologies are available that leverage a distributed architecture to provide protected and reliable storage of a read-heavy data set at the required performance levels. The adoption of cloud storage technologies that support collaboration will allow numerous users to work on projects and share data over public or private networks without geographic boundaries.

Eric Slack, Senior Analyst