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Why Corporate Cloud Storage Doesn't Add Up
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia sees few business IT situations that could make good use of full cloud storage services, outside of startups. 'As IT continues in a zigzag path of figuring out what to do with this "cloud" stuff, it seems that some companies are getting ahead of themselves. In particular, the concept of outsourcing storage to a cloud provider puzzles me. I can see some benefits in other cloud services (though I still find the trust aspect difficult to reconcile), but full-on cloud storage offerings don't make sense outside of some rare circumstances.'"
I keep all my furry pr0nz in the clowd
http://xkcd.org/908/
Cloud storage makes sense for some enterprises. Basically, those who can't tell their asshole from a hole in the ground. Those guys are probably better off subscribing to a nice idiot-proof, packaged service with crummy latency and 10 times the cost of managing their own array. And by the way, this may describe as much as 80% of corporate America.
I work for a printing company... cloud storage companies call us all the time with the pitches. Then they ask .. "how much data are you currently backing up?" .. we say "around 38 terabyte's" .. they say .. "no .. we aren't asking what your archives are, we are asking what your daily backups are." we say "we back up once a week. our weekly backups are around 38 terabytes." Then they say "that is a little more than we can handle" so I ask "well what can you handle?" almost every one of them has said they generally look for companies that have between 500GB and 1TB of storage. I guess if you fit that spec, it would work.
If you use a Mac in an enterprise
i'll stop you there, who would be that silly?
Truly a duh moment, and the only real question in my mind is "Who thought it was a good idea?"
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The cloud is the answer to EVERYTHING.
Despite data crystallization, sync, security and all of the usual complaints, it will solve everything and make toast, too!
I just came from a very large banking organization, and their business case for cloud is to set up a series of private cloud servers. It's not about putting everything on Amazon etc, but rather about putting the services into their own datacentres.
They will literaly save hundreds of millions in hardware and power bills, as they can consolidate tons of servers together. The reason? Most boxes that they current have, utilize 1% of network traffic, less than 1% of CPU, and about 10% of hard disk space. Why? Because every project has their own boxes for political reasons, for redundancy, and most importantly, so that when they saved $10,000/year on hardware, they didn't lose $1,000,000 because the service was unavailable for half a day.
Because private cloud means that you have an instant sandbox for your apps, over a number of servers that the app can freely be moved to, this is the driver behind adoption of the model.
Public cloud is laughable to them, as the public cloud providers can pry their data from the company's cold dead hands.
Not to mention the wonderful PR side effect of the company being "green".
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Ok. Somebody is completely off-their-head nuts, either the author or the people he is writing about(and I have my suspicions about the author...)
To the best of my knowledge, nobody pitches this 'cloud storage' stuff as a replacement for local storage, unless they are also selling some hosted software-as-a-vendor-lock-in 'solution'. It's a sufficiently overwhelmingly bad idea that nobody even tries. So, what exactly is he wasting an article on?
Yup, SATA drives are cheap and reasonably zippy. Y'know what's less cheap, more complex, and not as zippy? Good Backups, including offsite. And that, (along with the web hosting and CDN focused stuff) is what the 'cloud' people are selling. No shit delivering files over the internet with a 200ms round-trip and a teeny pipe isn't going to replace the local storage or a network share a couple of GigE hops away. Replace that balky tape library the next time it conks out, though? Not certain; but much more conceivable...
Mark Crispin (inventor of IMAP) has this posted on his website and Facebook page:
"Those who live by the cloud, die by the cloud."
We use Box for 300 people in 8 countries and I use Dropbox and Skyfile for personal file storage and sharing. There is a place for Cloud storage in corporate IT since the end users are using these services on mobile devices already. The author is obviously out of touch with current CIO initiatives, I talk to these guys everyday and most are looking to use cloud services for file storage and sharing.
Gluster - Local storage? ok. Remote storage? ok. Redundant sets of data across multiple availability zones in EC2 or different providers or local and remote? ok.). http://www.gluster.org/
If you use a Mac in an enterprise where the Infrastructure admins refuse to investigate why network performance grinds to a halt at 2:30pm everyday on the Windows shares, then you are dying for an alternative, competitive solution to your internal storage monopoly. Especially when your files are destined for publication anyhow, so data security concerns are much less.
Maybe that slowdown is caused by bad behavior from the Macs on the network that IT doesn't know about.
Why don't people look in the history books of computing. If they did they would see that in the before the 80's everything was in "the cloud", except back then they called it servers. They rented these servers and the storage space from IBM, Digital, HP and a few other server providers. The personal computer came a long and data started shifting on to local hard drives and WIntel or Novell LAN servers.
Now they have the problem of trying to maintain every spreadsheet and Access DB sitting on a managers laptop. To solve this they are going back to the future and storing stuff back on servers sold to us by young people who never knew what DASD is. Controls and audits will demand restricted access and rules be put in the cloud for protection just like before. After about 10 years we will all be bitching and complaining about the cloud and praising local storage for it's ease of access and not having our data held hostage by providers. Lather, rinse, repeat.
There is nothing new under the sun people, just move along.
Ok. Maybe one person to be an adviser on which services to use and how to configure them, (and which Mac models to buy heh heh) but that's about it.
In that context, cloud storage makes eminent sense because for the cloud service provider, providing reliable storage, or apps, or whatever, is their core competency.
It is not your company's core competency. They will do it better than you. Period.
Such storage would make even more sense if it was properly fragmented, onion-routed, multiply encryption-wrapped, encryption-upgradable-in-place etc etc etc but that will all come, as will, one hopes, open standards so that cloud storage is not vendor-locked.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
For me the one attractive use case for cloud storage is for backups - and it's one that's catered to particularly poorly by current offerings.
For backups, you want (a) fast, unmetered links to the host and (b) moderately reliable, cheap, and not-that-fast storage you can access in a variety of different ways depending on what's most convenient, with or without running your own VPS to mediate between storage and storage clients.
One user will want to rsync to their cloud storage. One will want to remote-mount a file system on it via iSCSI. Another will want to run a Bacula storage daemon on it. Yet another will want to use it as a co-ordinator for a full network backup system. All these use cases should really be supported, and the first two shouldn't need the customer to maintain their own VPS to control the storage.
As things stand, almost everyone wants to sell SAN-based high performance storage that's *expensive* and *fast*, not cheap and slow. Most backup services seem to want you to use their tools or a local appliance to talk to their storage. Half of them act very confused when you mention "Linux" or "UNIX" and ask if that's a new kind of Mac or something. At least in Australia I've found the market miserably unsatisfying so far.
What I'd really like is for ISPs to begin offering, or partnering with others to offer via peering, bulk near-line storage at moderately affordable rates. That way you can talk to it over your business's main ADSL/SHDSL/fibre/whatever link(s) without dealing with quotas, it's fast, there are multiple routes to it, and it's unlikely to go down if an international link has a hiccup.
iiNet's cloud offering looked like it might have potential for this, but it turns out to be just another EC2-wannabe crossed with Linode-done-badly-and-expensively. The storage offerings are miserable and they don't even mention whether traffic between iiNet internet services and their cloud is metered
obviously the solution is to move the shares to an offsite location on a much thinner pipe
I have the same issue. I work for a small suburban newspaper, and even our hot data set is over 1TB, plus append-only archival data of more than 4TB.
When I tell these "cloud backup" providers this they do a double-take and then start talking laughably high prices or they just back off and say they can't really handle our archival data set. It's quite pathetic when my 10TB backup storage server in a fire-resistant, water-resistant enclosure in the shed cost under $5k when built - and that was when 10x1TB disks was a lot so the disks cost over $2500 by themselves.
Because I'm in Australia I also have the issue of bandwidth. I'd need a backup provider to peer with my ISP via a local peering point that offers unmetered traffic; with 100GB/month limits considered very big here I couldn't possibly back up over a metered link. Even then, my redundant two ADSL2+ links achive about 6Mbit/750kbit and 4Mbit/500kbit per second each, so I'd probably need to pay to run fibre from the nearest line along the train line (est $50,000) and pay over $1000/month for a fibre service just to talk to the backup storage host.
I'm negotiating to move our backup server to a business down the street and run an 802.11n point-to-point directional link between us instead. We each get to fail over to each others' Internet services if necessary, we exchange backup storage, and neither of us gets to pay through the nose for it. It's not as good as a fast link to a DC somewhere, but it's a hell of a lot more practical.
The other issue with cloud backups arises when you need that 5TB (mine) or 38TB (yours) in a hurry, for disaster recovery. You can't exactly run down the street and grab the server with its disk array then restore over 1Gbit ethernet or direct to locally attached SAS/eSATA/whatever. Nope, you have to download all that data over whatever Internet link you have access to. If that's not the dedicated fast link your premises has (say, if they've burned down) then you are screwed.
I'll keep my primary backups within driving distance, thanks.
Now try being in Australia, where in addition to those downsides we have tightly metered traffic on Internet links, not just for international traffic over the undersea cables but for ALL traffic not to/from our local ISP.
People trying to sell cloud storage in this environment are off their nut.
At the end of the day it comes down to this: who is responsible for keeping your data? With failures in amazon's cloud service, a provider over east in Australia that got hacked and lost all backups, etc - trusting your company's data to someone else is a BIG call to make and understandably, many businesses are wary of the idea.
At least if the data is stored on premises, and on backup tapes, you have options with regards to data retention/data recovery. Once you upload all your stuff to the cloud, you're at the mercy of your cloud provider. Sure, you may have an SLA, but SLAs mean shit if your company is unable to get access to it's data when required - or would like to prevent third parties from obtaining access to data (such as foreign governments) that the cloud provider may be persuaded or legally required to divulge.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
sounds like someone is doing something they should not be doing, like manually virus scanning the shares from their desktop
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
trust your sensitive data to others that only see you as a line item in their billing system? Sorry, just stupid.
I signed up for Dropbox and my experience with it is that it's slow as molasses when uploading and I can't just drop a link there and have it point at my server. Nono, I must upload the entire file itself.
Most people would be better off with Opera Unite. While some here may laugh and point at it because it is not a full-blown server setup, it is probably the easiest ad-hoc file sharing/server program going. Sure, I've personally installed Apache, sftpd and sshd on my home server but just the concepts of these services alone are beyond the grasp of most people. Opera Unite makes this kind of thing drool-proof.
You declare which directories are shared and that's it. You're done. No uploading to the "cloud" like Dropbox, Skydrive, or Apple's music thingy (and Unite will do media streaming). And you don't get locked in or risk losing control of your data should the cloud service get closed down.
--
BMO
To just send our not-so-important, older bulk data like before and after photos, old autocad files, and reports to "the cloud" on our $270 internet connection would take over 90 hours so...that's what I think of that.
It's just more like cirrocumulus than cumulonimbus.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Cloud was appropriately chosen to help marketeers sell to those in management that live in clouds, confusion, obscurity ....
The word cloud should be reserved for weather reports/conversations.
Virtualization of infrastructure and web-services/application clouds is how I explain to management. Still I fail to convey any technology analyst/adviser... wisdom too money spenders, career managers, a/o decision makers. Telling management that a CMS is a CMS is a CMS ... still means windchill, filenet ... proprietary products are always the only available solution. I tell them Alfresco is a competitive CMS, but by then they forget what is a CMS, then decide only visiting marketeers with a sell, sell, sell ... agenda can possibly know the best solution.
The past year has been the greatest technology disappointment in my career. I can and will retire in three years and look for a marketing job with a NPF.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Who pwns u 848y?
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
As soon as IT managers figure out they are paying a premium for the same set of problems they battle with in-house this will all be over with ver quickly and we can all get back to work.
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That is a way better question.
It'll never happen with data within the credit industry. With so many regulations on privacy now using a third party cloud storage provider would be a gross violation of privacy laws.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Its probably an automatic scan like the one that gets setup by Norton. After all, the technical competency of certain desktop users has always been questionable.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
OK, I've gone and looked into the current situation with tape. All prices are in AUD from vendors in Australia; 1 AUD = 1.06 USD at the moment, so they're close enough to the the same.
LTO-5 drives are now AU$2500 to AU$3000 + SAS HBA, a good year or two after I built that backup server. Most of our data set is data in formats that're already efficiently compressed with JPEG, LZO, PNG, deflate/zlib, etc, there's no significant compression gain; tapes can be presumed to be 1.5TB. The weekly hot set is over 1TB and the archives are over 5TB. We can probably pare the weekly down enough to fit it on a single LTO-5 along with the differentials, but we don't have tons of headroom. Library/loader units are AU$5k (sans tape drive) and up. Tapes are AU$80 or so, and shipping renders direct import no cheaper except in vast quantities.
Because of the cost of the LTO-5 drive it's just not worth it when you're only running a few tapes. We'd be better off with a fire-protected power-protected LTO-4 autoloader system. I've found one on end-of-line special at AU$4k down from AU$10k for 19TB of capacity (24 tapes), which is almost attractive. With LTO-4 tapes at about AU$55, that's a total of a bit over AU$5000 for library+tapes, or $263/TB, plus the controlling server. Still not exactly cheap.
Given that 1TB HDDs were down to below $100 ea, I could build a 10TB backup array (11 disks; 8TB usable; RAID6 + 1 hot spare) for about $1100 + enclosure. 4xSATA HBAs are less than $100 ea and putting three in a regular full-ATX or mini-ATX board is no big deal. Linux's software RAID (md) does a great job for this sort of thing, where write-through caching is acceptable because writes are mostly linear.
Given that we need the same kind of fire-resistant enclosures etc whether we're using tape or HDD, HDD wins by a mile.
If we were removing and rotating tapes daily then we might be able to get away without the fire protection. Maybe. The backups tend to run overnight with tapes exchanged in the morning, and that means there's a big window for loss before the tape gets taken away. Then there's the issue of finding someone trustworthy and reliable to exchange the tapes and, more importantly, not lose them.
As far as I can see, tape still loses unless you're doing LOTS of off-site archiving and have a large rotating media library. Even then it's tempting to just use HDDs in hot-swap caddies.
I don't think the economics support tape anymore.