Storage Management Strategies for the CIO
This article can also be found in the Premium Editorial Download "Storage magazine: Exploring near-continuous data protection for operational recovery."
Download it now to read this article plus other related content.
EMC's most prominent customer is AT&T. The AT&T Synaptic Storage virtual private cloud, however, is a hybrid storage cloud offering that's quite different from others. It runs in AT&T data centers, but is accessed by customers through AT&T's MPLS network. As a result, it combines security and performance of private clouds with the economics and scalability of public cloud offerings.
Besides EMC Atmos, there are several other cloud storage software products. Caringo Inc. brought CAStor Content Storage Software into this market by repositioning its content addressable storage (CAS) product as a cloud storage solution. Cleversafe Inc. offers a cloud storage platform that leverages information dispersal algorithms (IDAs) that slice data across nodes in the cloud, eliminating the need for replication; Cleversafe claims it has achieved substantially higher storage utilization than products that have to store multiple copies of data on storage nodes for redundancy.
Hybrid cloud storage gateways
Cloud storage gateways sit between on-premise storage and public cloud storage. They translate between traditional storage protocols and the more esoteric cloud storage protocols and APIs. Historically, public cloud storage could only be accessed via custom integration. Furthermore, cloud gateways perform data migration of data from on-premise storage into public cloud storage and vice versa, usually via policy engines.
Cloud storage
Requires Free Membership to View
gateways differ in several key areas. They're either block or file based; and they
present themselves within the data center as block-based storage or NAS devices. Data deduplication
and compression are critical cloud gateway features, as both features significantly impact cloud
storage cost. Encryption of data in-transit and while stored in the storage cloud is a must. Some
gateways are designed and optimized for backup and archival, some are closely integrated with
applications like Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, and others are targeted as a transactional
cloud storage tier to supplement internal storage tiers.
PRODUCT SAMPLER: CLOUD STORAGE GATEWAYS
Enlarge PRODUCT SAMPLER: CLOUD STORAGE GATEWAYS diagram.
This was first published in January 2011
Join the conversationComment
Share
Comments
Results
Contribute to the conversation