Slashdot Mirror
Mega-Uploads: The Cloud's Unspoken Hurdle
First time accepted submitter n7ytd writes "The Register has a piece today about overcoming one of the biggest challenges to migrating to cloud-based storage: how to get all that data onto the service provider's disks. With all of the enterprisey interweb solutions available, the oldest answer is still the right one: ship them your disks. Remember: 'Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.'"
Second biggest challenge: trusting any of these places have the motivation to keep your data more secure than credit card companies do.
Getting around all the buzzwords
Well that's one hurdle.
The next is RECOVERY when ICE or FBI or some other 3letter agency walks in an takes your data because one tiny customer use the service for some allegedly nefarious purpose.
The key here is to use a service so big that even god himself would not dare take it down, although the Ayatollah might try. Small cloud services, even if multi-homed are a risky proposition. Even if you do manage to get all your data into them, they are not large enough to push back against any subpoena or search warrant that any misguided judge in some backwater jurisdiction may issue.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
No, the second biggest challenge is to come up with a viable exit strategy. Once you have several TB at this service provider, how will you move it out of there when the next provider has a better deal? That was one of the major big points for having a cloud in the first place, to have the freedom to move your compute requirements to a better, cheaper, faster (pick two) provider.
Even if you moved it in with a station wagon full of tapes or disks and your provider let you import it, I'm sure your provider will not be so helpful when you need to move it back out.
Blatant plug: Perhaps Actifio (www.actifio.com) can fix this for you, by replicating your data in, and also back out of production systems in deduped and compressed format.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
... is getting it all back OFF again when you want to switch service providers.
The one thing you want never to happen is that you get locked in to a single cloud service. They might go bust, they might become uncompetitive. They may become politically "unfriendly" or tainted with customers you have no desire to be associated with - or any of a number of other reasons to say "adios".
Just like with disaster planning, all the processes and procedures, agreements and SLAs are worthless until you've actually PERFORMED the operation and done so without a major service interruption. How many cloud users have gone that far - and how many are locked in but don't know it?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
You don't know the exact dialogue between the journalist and the rep. I've been quoted in print in similarly stupid ways when what I said made absolute sense in context to what was asked. "Pressed if disks are accepted" could have been something like the rep telling them about a new CSV import tool they had built, the journalist saying "So if I mailed you a 5TB database on a disk, could you import that?", and the rep replying "Sure, but you'd need to export the data first...".
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
How did you manage to fix armed FBI storming your servers located in another country problem?