Newest Cloud Storage Enabler

I was fielding an inquiry from one of my engineers and thought I'd share it, as it's probably a common question, esp. as we continue to see Cloud awareness spread, while the network barriers to external Cloud service adoption remain. Enjoy.

-----Original Message-----

Sent: Monday, September 20, 2010 5:30 PM
Subject: Cirtas

Hi Mike,
I'm interested in Cirtas, because a user asked me. What do you think of this kind of storage?

-----Original Message-----

From: Mike Harding
Sent: Tuesday, September 21, 2010 9:36 AM
Subject: RE: Cirtas


This is a very valuable solution. Much of 'Cloud storage' is not useful for companies for at least a few key reasons:

1) Security -- It's the #1 inhibitor to using external cloud services. Customers are worried that their data will be compromised either in transit outside of the corporate firewall, or after it's been stored, especially within a multi-tenant hosting environment.

2) Performance -- The second biggest problem with hosting your data in the cloud is that it's far away from the applications and users. So the distance between you and your data creates latency as well as other common WAN issues such as jitter, lost packets, etc. This is why we've seen much of cloud storage being for deep archiving or uses where you don't care how long it takes to either put or retrieve your data, such as email archiving for regulatory reasons.

3) The need to change your application -- Many providers, even those using brand name enterprise-class storage hardware such as EMC Atmos, are only allowing access via a RESTful API. This means that the customer needs to write an application that uses this API in order to store and access the data, and for all intents and purposes, limits the use of that cloud storage for web application media and data.

Cirtas, which just launched publically, is a great example of what I call a Cloud Storage Enabler in that they allow customers to overcome these barriers to adopting the external cloud. Their product, Bluejet, encrypts your data so it's secure both in transit and at-rest. It accelerates the transit with data compression and deduplication. And it emulates local storage, so it looks like any NFS/CIFS target to your applications and users. Cirtas is one of a number of companies with similar Cloud Enabler solutions - you should also consider Nasuni, TwinStrata, Panzura and StorSimple.

Thanks, and good luck,

Mike Harding