USC CTO Leads University in its Shift to the Cloud

Nirvanix recently announced that it had successfully sold a private cloud storage solution to the University of Southern California (USC) that will very soon house over 8 PB of unstructured data; half on site on the USC campus and half off site. The initiative to lead USC to the cloud in order to leverage IT as a strategic enabler was led by Sam Gustman, CTO of the USC Shoah Foundation, who worked with Nirvanix and Integrated Media Technologies (IMT) to architect the overall solution.

The importance of this project is that USC is shifting over 8 petabytes of unstructured data to the cloud and Nirvanix is managing the whole offering as a service. Of the cloud storage service providers Nirvanix is the only one that we know of that also provides their solution in this private model, as a fully managed service. This provides USC with a scalable, geo-diverse cloud storage platform to be able to facilitate demand from their users and clients. They can roll the project out with the comfort of knowing that their private cloud is not being shared with the general public and resides within their own secure facilities.

The second interesting point of this project is that it reflects a growing trend that we expect to accelerate; IT users becoming IT sellers. The USC Digital Repository can now resell their own private cloud storage as a public cloud to other interested parties looking for full media preservation and cataloging services.

Part of the Nirvanix private cloud solution is a Deep Cloud Archive, which enables companies to replace their current reliance on tape media with a fully managed service offering. This service will seamlessly extend USC’s on site private cloud and provide a long-term deep archive on a highly-secure cloud platform. Given the way the university system works you would think that this service would be attractive to other universities so they can house their data on USC’s public cloud.

Our understanding is that several other more traditional, legacy storage providers tried to design a solution that would meet USC’s needs. While several claimed to be able to meet the capacity demands, most fell short when it came to providing a global namespace. A global namespace allows users to access files without concern for the physical location of the file. This is similar to how DNS works today on the Internet. You provide a URL not an IP address to get to a webpage. In the same fashion a global namespace allows you to access a file by its name instead of location.

Nirvanix’s GNS specifically enables you to upload a file once in any location, and download it anywhere in the world—it’s not confined to a single data center, region or segment of a cloud.

The fourth key of the project was Nirvanix’s Cloud File System, which provides data consistency—meaning changes to a file are reflected across the whole cloud immediately, not during consistency windows or at some future point in time--and has the ability to create a multi-tenant file structure that is under full USC control. This will allow multiple departments as well as potentially multiple universities to access the same private cloud storage solution yet maintain full security and individual control. Data security will be a key point that attracts other users to the system and allows USC to recognize additional revenue from their investment in Nirvanix.

We think that these five ingredients (private cloud storage as a service, IT buyers to become IT sellers, a global namespace, data consistency and a multi-tenant file structure) will be the foundational components that organizations will require as they begin to deploy their own private cloud storage infrastructures.

Having built dedicated private clouds for IBM, Cerner and now USC and enabling each to have its own dedicated cloud storage resources for private uses--and the ability to resell those resources as a public cloud service--provides a dual role for the Nirvanix private cloud solution that we understand additional companies will be rolling out in the coming months.