Cirtas’ cloud partnerships are currently with Amazon S3 and Iron Mountain; their approach to certifying cloud providers is intentionally more conservative than other similar solutions since Cirtas is strictly focused on the enterprise customer. Simply having an understanding of the API is not enough; Cirtas feels it is important to do a full regression test to make sure they discover and address any nuances that each provider will have and to optimize performance reading and writing to that provider. Their reseller channel is already established with similar marquee names as the initial wave of enterprise customers. Lastly, support is also already in place with availability of an enterprise class 24x7x365, four hour response time level of service.

Enterprise Cloud

Until now, cloud storage just hasn’t been ready for the enterprise. First, it uses a new communication protocol instead of enterprise-established protocols. Second, there are constant concerns about security in a shared infrastructure. Third, it may have performance issues vs. the local SAN. Fourth, it is often feature-poor compared to enterprise storage, lacking features like snapshots and thin provisioning. Finally, while capacity costs are metered per GB, costs can be unpredictable with highly interactive data sets.  Cirtas is solving these issues by offering a new product called Bluejet Cloud Storage Controller, which connects to the SAN with standard enterprise protocols, offers full encryption before the enterprise’s data goes to the cloud provider, and delivers local storage performance, a feature rich data set and a storage model that optimizes the data footprint and data transmissions to minimize cloud costs. Beyond that it leverages the cloud to make local storage better by offering such features like automatic disaster recovery and the elimination of the backup process since data is constantly snapshotted to the cloud. Even new storage system migration is eliminated. If a new Bluejet appliance is purchased, one simply replaces the old appliance, points to the data set in the cloud and the upgrade and “migration” is complete.

Controller vs. Gateway

It is important to note that the Bluejet appliance is actually a storage controller – not just a cloud gateway. It is no different than the enterprise class storage controllers that you find in incumbent vendors’ storage arrays, with the exception that there are not racks of storage shelves to pay for, allocate space for, power and cool. This is also not a virtual appliance that runs in software. This is a purpose-built solution that does not have to contend with running five (or more) other applications, in which hardware redundancy is built-in, data is fully protected, and monitoring and management are fully integrated. For the enterprise consistency and stability are critical.

Cache and WAN Optimization

Much of Cirtas’ intellectual property is the cache prediction algorithms and its WAN optimization. Cache accuracy becomes critical in the cloud, not only for speed of response to storage requests but also to minimize transfer costs: the more accurate the cache the less often data needs to be retransmitted across the cloud. Space optimization capabilities like deduplication and compression not only improve WAN efficiency they also reduce storage costs at the provider. There are also specific WAN optimization capabilities that make transfer to and from the cloud more efficient than previously allowed.

The appliance itself is a 2U device. It contains 16GB of RAM for high-speed caching, a 64GB SLC SSD and about 3.5 TB (usable space) of SAS spinning disk. It uses its caching algorithms to move data from RAM through the storage tiers on the device and to the cloud as determined by use. In many cases performance could be better than what the user is currently experiencing from their non-cloud systems.

The reporting engine of the Bluejet is also very unique: not only does it make your storage utilization costs understandable by detailing costs on a volume by volume basis, it also shows you a real time ROI compared to local storage. It will also report on upload and download frequency as different cloud providers vary their pricing model based on those transfer rates.

Storage Switzerland’s Take

Cirtas is making major strides in making cloud storage appeal to the enterprise. Not only by using a hybrid model to move data to and from the cloud but to focus on optimizing the movement of that data and its storage. With Cirtas, the cloud may be right for a whole new class of customer and in fact the enterprise may be a more ideal candidate for using cloud storage than another class of customer.