Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Any rapidly growing market is subject to changes in the suppliers that provide its services. In fact, as the recent announcements have shown, size and years in business have nothing to do with a company’s ability to compete in a marketplace. At some point every organization must be able to show a profit or cease operations. If accurate forecasting of which company is most likely to succeed in these markets is beyond the capabilities of analysts who focus on those markets exclusively, then asking the storage manager to make that call is equally unreasonable. Implementing cloud storage is really no different than any other technology. After all the analysis there is a gradual transition to the technology to see how it performs in a production environment. Even once the transition is complete any IT manager should have a safety net in case something goes wrong; it’s just prudent. The cloud should be treated no differently.

For organizations considering cloud storage there are two choices: avoid cloud storage altogether by chalking it up as too risky and too unstable, or have the flexibility to move between cloud providers as needed. Avoiding cloud storage may seem like the simplest solution, but is it really? First, as mentioned above, any technology investment has a certain amount of risk associated with it. Consider this fact: there’s no guarantee that the manufacturer of the on-premise storage system you buy today is any more likely to stay in business than a cloud storage provider. Even if your on-premise manufacturer is successful, the recent trend of big companies buying smaller ones may leave you with a storage system from a company that you don't want to do business with. Beyond the business nuances are the real, measurable cost advantages and management simplicity of the cloud. Those savings can help produce a significant competitive advantage to businesses that embrace cloud storage. And for some businesses it may be the only practical means of creating an affordable shared storage environment.

The net result is that cloud storage may be the most viable option for many small to medium sized businesses and it needs to be considered for those businesses to grow and remain responsive to users. Potentially, the best strategy then is to invest in cloud storage, but do so without being tied into a specific provider. This means having the ability to quickly migrate data from one provider to another. Migration is not just an important protection in case one cloud provider goes out of business. It’s also valuable for providing an alternative should the business relationship change with an existing cloud provider. Having the ability to switch may also keep the incumbent more responsive, and keep prices in line as well.

Given the recent high profile failure of the Amazon cloud it may be appropriate for the business to consider having data on two separate cloud storage providers at the same time. That way a failure in one would not be cause for alarm since the data could be accessible from the other cloud provider. The economics of the cloud are so compelling that two copies of data on two different providers may actually be less than the cost of keeping data stored and maintained locally. Again, this is not just a special cloud consideration, it’s good, standard IT practice to have redundancy built into every process and system.

Migration between suppliers can of course be done manually by copying the complete data set from one cloud to the local data center, and then copying that data to the new cloud provider. Not only does each transfer take considerable time, it also requires a remapping and reprograming of user profiles and applications for the new data paths. Compared to the situation of migrating data locally, from one NAS to a new NAS system, for example, cloud migration requires that ALL the data must be moved, and across a finite internet connection. In the local case the user can get away with only migrating a subset of the data, since often the old NAS will stay online for a considerable period of time. With cloud migration, a business relationship may be ending and ALL the data must be moved or two online storage contracts must be maintained.

Products like the Nasuni Filer are excellent examples of how this migration should work. Data can be seamlessly moved from provider to provider without interruption. The switch to the new storage is seamless to end users whose data is accessed in the same way as it was with the old provider. Of course migration functions like Nasuni's have other uses than just moving data from one cloud to another. It can also be used to migrate existing NAS assets to the Nasuni Filer, so it can then feed that data to the cloud storage provider.

The cloud is a growing, evolving organism. As that growth continues there will be companies that don't evolve with it, and may no longer be viable places to store data. That can be a universal decision in the form of the company shutting down or just a business unit decision, based on pricing or service. Regardless of the cause, it’s unreasonable to expect an IT staff to pick the right cloud storage vendor every time. Cloud storage solutions like Nasuni can give customers a safety net so they can move data between storage providers as needed, or keep it on dual providers simultaneously.

George Crump, Senior Analyst