Cloud Storage Optimization market

A new product category is shaping up in direct response to a new customer need.  As seen in recent stories like "What's keeping Data Storage Out of the Cloud?", companies want to use new Cloud Storage services from providers such as IBM, but they are concerned about the security, availability and cost of the required network connection.  Enter Cloud Storage Optimization.

To bridge this network gap customers face a number of sub-optimal alternatives:

1. Don't worry about it -- probably the most popular approach, which only works if you don't care about your job, or the value of the data going across the wire is so low that it's not a big deal if it takes forever for the transit, or it's hacked, or both.
2. Lease a private connection -- this is an option for 'too big to fail banks' or other major organizations where cost isn't an issue.  But for most companies, the incremental cost of the circuit eliminates the economic savings of the Cloud service.
3. Use a generic WAN optimization box -- Not a great solution as these are software-based appliances designed for lower-bandwidth branch-office connections and a broad mix of transactional data.  The Cloud Storage connection is really a SAN-like 'channel' which will be very data intensive, and will benefit from hardware-based compression and offload processing.  And similar to the private circuit, the cost of the WAN optimization appliance that supports the higher throughput needed for the Cloud storage will cost you more than your annual Cloud storage bill.

What we're seeing in response is an initial first step towards closing this market gap: a new category of Cloud Storage Optimization solutions, or Cloud Storage Gateways.  Representative companies include Cirtas, Twinstrata, Nasuni and StorSimple.  These are all start-ups who seem to be quickly gaining awareness and traction with companies and Cloud Service Providers.

The anatomy of a Cloud Storage Gateway is made of software that either resides within an x86 server (i.e. an appliance) or completely as software that can be deployed within a VM.  They typically are asymmetric (i.e. single-device) solutions often positioned as a NAS filer.  Typical capabilities include NAS-to-Cloud API emulation, WAN Optimization, Caching, In-transit Encryption and Data management features such as snapshots.  As software-based solutions they are flexible, and meant to be affordable and targeted to a more mid-market customer.  Similarly they are intended for not-overly-demanding throughput needs, as there is no purpose-built processor offload. 

For mid-market companies looking to add a Cloud tier of archival or similar offline data storage, these are products to consider.  For enterprises or companies who want to leverage Cloud storage as a nearstore alternative, you will want to wait for next-gen 'Cloud Networking' products built for high-throughput, hardware-assisted optimization, symmetric caching/network de-dupe capabilities, and that integrate with your existing network management framework.