Researching enterprise cloud gateways

I have a new project at work to add more storage to our China data center. We are still running an old version of Backup Exec and going to tape.

I decided this could be a good opportunity to checkout the cloud as an option for storage. I?ve also been replacing my monthly and yearly tapes here in my local datacenter with cloud storage, but that?s a post for another day.

 

I?ve found a few company?s that offer either Cifs or ISCI gateway devices to the cloud. All of them use local storage as a buffer to speed up the writes then move the data into the cloud.

Because of the small size of the China datacenter I don?t need much storage, I currently have an old EMC CX at the site, but its older and would need another DAE to expand it.

 

Nasuni

Nasuni was the first vendor I spoke to, they are cifs only and come as a virtual appliance. Their cost includes the cost of the cloud storage unlike any of the other vendors. The use the local storage as cache only and push all data to the cloud. Snaps are included with the product and they are how you would do backups of the unit. I?m still not sold on the idea that snaps are backups, maybe for the small amount of data they have in China but it wouldn?t scale to the 10TB of files we have in our local data center. Nasuni does do some deduplication, but its only between versions of the same file.

Because the data and all the configuration is stored in the cloud, if you have a failure of the ESX server hosting the nasuni vm, you can just download another vm image and install it on any ESX anywhere and it will pull down the config of your old nasuni including the cifs server and shares, pretty sweet.

 

Storsimple

Storsimple is an ISCI SAN that does storage tiering into the cloud. They have snaps and clones for the ISCI luns that get copied to the cloud, again they version of backup. They have a hardware device that is your ISCI target with SDD to speed up the writes. They dedupe across all files at the block level to reduce local and cloud storage.

This device is interesting because it is on the VMware ready list. They recommend at least a 10meg internet circuit for their solutions. They also have some SharePoint and exchange modules for backup and replication integration with those two products.

 

There are 5 other solutions I haven?t dug into yet.

panzura

cirtas

nirvaxix

twinstrata

egnyte

 

Do you use cloud storage as part of your data center? Did I miss any cloud gateway storage providers? Do you have a storage to tell about cloud storage let use know.

2 thoughts on “Researching enterprise cloud gateways

  1. Mass use of cloud storage, in my opinion, is going to be the midsection between where we are now with pop technology and the point where we make the paradigm shift to using cloud based computing to manipulate our data. This point when cloud as a service takes over will also be the end of massive cloud storage companies unless they can work something out with the cloud computing companies that is both cost and cloud effective.

    The cloud services are still maturing, so we shall see what time reveals to us!

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