Online Storage Optimization

George Crump has a piece in Byte and Switch today that poses an important question: “Can we get to a single point of deduplication?” This is a question that we have taken up in one form or another in some of our recent posts, such as this one and this one.

In the article, Crump asks the question in another way: “… can you have all your data tiers; primary, archive and backup deduplicated by a single engine?”

In light of the recent focus on deduplication, this in my view is a question that really does need to be raised. For how long will the industry to silo out these different tiers for its deduplication solutions? And how much sense does it make to rehydrate data every time you move it, in order to once again deduplicate it? Not a lot.

Crump writes: “The current deduplication vendors could work on building out their solutions to either scale up into primary storage performance (see Data Domain’s DD880) or they could move their existing data duplication technology into other markets; see the increased speed of Ocarina Networks and Permabit as well as their move into cloud storage.”

At the same time, as we’ve pointed out here, online storage is quite a bit different than backups and so far at least, none of the successful backup dedupe vendors - Data Domain, Diligent, Quantum, etc. have been able to break into it. Rather, it is NetApp and Ocarina who have been the trailblazers.

Crump makes another key point:

“NetApp and Ocarina could continue to enhance and improve the re-hydration speed of their technologies to make read performance a non-issue, making primary storage a viable platform. Ocarina can already maintain the deduplicated format as they move through tiers, so landing on backup or archive disk would simply be another move for them.”

This is an interesting observation, and one that is often missed in reporting on both of these solutions. We look forward to seeing more debate and discussion on this issue, which was well kicked off with this piece.

A story caught my eye this morning that I just couldn’t help but blog about. Dave Simpson over at InfoStor is reporting that our friends at Nirvanix are providing cloud storage for a NASA mission to orbit the moon! As Simpson points out this is perhaps the most creative usage of cloud storage we’ve seen. I mean, really, how much more cool can you get with storage?

As Dave did, I will reproduce the entire press release here:

Nirvanix Brings Storage from the Moon to the Cloud with Successful Launch of Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

Comprehensive imagery data from onboard cameras providing deeper understanding of the moon and its environment to be copied to CloudNAS-based solution

San Diego, June 29, 2009 – An Atlas V 401 rocket carrying two lunar satellites launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 5:32 p.m. EDT on June 18th in what is being described as America’s first step to the lasting return to the moon. One of the satellites, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), will begin to provide high-definition imagery of the moon once in orbit with a copy of all data stored on the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network™ via CloudNAS®, a software based gateway to secure enterprise cloud storage.

After a four-day trip, the LRO will begin orbiting the moon, spending at least a year in a low polar orbit collecting detailed information about the lunar environment that will help in future robotic and human missions to the moon. Images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera will be transmitted from the satellite to a project team at Arizona State University for systematic processing, replicated to secondary high-performance storage in a separate building at ASU and then replicated to the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network (SDN™). Nirvanix provides a method for storing a tertiary copy of the data offsite by installing CloudNAS and writing a copy directly from the data-receiving servers. ASU and NASA have already transferred multiple TBs of original Apollo mission imagery to the Nirvanix CloudNAS-based solution.

“While this project may be one small step for NASA’s program to extend human presence in the solar system, it definitely represents a giant leap in cloud storage’s ability to provide a reliable, scalable and accessible alternative to tape for long-term retention of enterprise-class data,” said Jim Zierick, President and CEO of Nirvanix. “The tertiary copy of images from the LRO Camera stored on the Nirvanix CloudNAS is online and accessible within seconds and the project managers at ASU do not need to worry about managing offsite storage, allowing them to focus on the more important mission at hand. We are pleased to be part of such a historic project and value our contribution to finding a deeper understanding of the moon and its environment.”

Nirvanix CloudNAS is a fast, secure and easy way to gain access to the benefits of Cloud Storage. As the world’s first software-only NAS solution accessible via CIFS or NFS, CloudNAS offers enhanced secure data transfers to any of Nirvanix’s globally distributed storage nodes using integrated AES 256-bit encryption and SSL options. Through the Nirvanix CloudNAS, organizations have access to unlimited storage via the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network with the ability to turn any server on their network into a gateway to the cloud accessible by many existing applications and processes.

About Nirvanix

Nirvanix is the market leader in enterprise cloud storage and offers a fully managed cloud storage service designed from the ground up for the enterprise. Headquartered in San Diego, California, Nirvanix is privately held and has raised more than $23 million in funding from world-class investors including Intel Capital, Valhalla Partners, Mission Ventures, Windward Ventures, and the European Founders Fund. Nirvanix has over 500 customers ranging from Internet startups to Fortune 10 organizations and include Arizona State University, Nero, and The Planet, among others.

For more information about the company and its services, visit www.nirvanix.com.

If it isn’t already, then Stephen Foskett’s Enterprise Storage Strategies blog for Nirvanix should be on your reading list. Today he has an interesting take on some statistics that have emerged on the future of NAS, as collected by analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group. Analyst Terri McClure has an excellent post on the results. Here are some of the most compelling facts and predictions:

• Worldwide file archive capacity will increase from just over 10,000 petabytes in 2008 to over 62,000 petabytes in 2012—a 55% compound annual growth rate.
• The top NAS features users are looking for have to do with reducing cost in terms of power, cooling, floor space, and data footprint.
• 30% of respondents said they would not buy NAS storage without some kind of data reduction (dedupe and/or compression), and 46% would strongly prefer it.

As Stephen points out in his post, these and other findings should make you stop and think about your storage strategy. He suggests using storage resource management tools such as Microsoft’s File Server Resource Manager to ensure efficient capacity usage, as well as a data reduction tool such as the Ocarina Optimizer, along with virtualization, and migration to the cloud–using a product such as Nirvanix’s CloudNAS–for less-used data. All great suggestions, we think.

Wikibon’s Dave Vellante has a slightly different take on the growth picture, as he alerted me on Twitter. In essence, he is saying that taking into account disk cost reductions, spending won’t increase at the same rates as many analysts have predicted. However, the point still stands that power, cooling and other space considerations aren’t going anywhere. Not only that, but with a solution such as Ocarina, using data reduction actually means taking advantage of Moore’s Law and riding down the cost of disk.

All in all a worthwhile subject to look at and better understand if you are seeking to map out your storage budget. And if you are on Twitter, I recommend you follow all three of these folks: Stephen Foskett, Dave Vellante, and Terri McClure.

More cloud storage news today, as ParaScale is offering software that allows companies to turn a network of commodity Linux servers into a cloud storage platform. Sony Pictures Imageworks and Stanford Genome Technology Center are testing it with an eye towards using it to manage their massive image rich storage needs.

Good coverage of the announcement by Lucas Mearian at Computerworld and Dave Raffo at SearchStorage.

In the press release, Noemi Greyzdorf, storage analyst at IDC is quoted saying “‘ParaScale’s flexible, object-oriented file system allowing scale and ease of management across different pools of storage and will enable content and general tier2 storage deployments to achieve new levels of economy and flexibility.’”

On a related note, Chris Evans has written a thoughtful post on cloud storage and availability questions on his Storage Architect blog.

Looking forward to hearing the speculation across the blogosphere about what if anything this vendor is offering that’s new.

Just in time to celebrate the birthday of Dr. Seuss (of which any Google user was made aware yesterday), blogger Christopher Hoff has penned a Seussian paean to the hotter than hot technology du jour, cloud computing. The poem goes on for over 20 stanzas, and covers immense ground by comparing this craze with the promises of those multiple slicer/dicers that fill up the screen on the home shopping channel.

In spite of its breeziness, in the end the poem brings up a more serious message:

“It’s profoundly game changing

and as long as we focus

and don’t buy into the

hyped hocus pocus

So before we end up
with a Cloud that ’slices and dices’
that never gets dull,
mashes, grates, grinds and rices

It’s important to state

what problem we’re solving

so the Cloud doesn’t end up

with its value de-evolving”

Hats off to this clever poem. And now, here, for your viewing pleasure is my stab at some verse in much the same style:

In a land faraway called the Valley of Sil
Lived the people they called the old Ventu Capitils

These folks they were known from Dubai to Madras
As the givers of gold for compression in NAS

Not to mention a whole lot of techy innovations
And for the best of them all there’s a standing ovation.

The Valley of Sil is a land like no other
Said Cindy Lou Who and her venturesome brother

We must go to this place
And find out how we can squeeze more out of our disk space

We need someone who understands our expenses are growing
There’s OpEx and CapEx I mean I ain’t fooling

So they found a new URL and tracked down Mr. Murli
Who said I’ll increase your capacity fully

I’m compressing your disk space from 100 to 10
I’m putting all kinds of new spaces right in

And so Cindy Lou Who started a-dancin the macarena
And gave lots of thanks to the amazing Ocarina.

With so much talk about the cloud on blogs far and wide, it was inevitable, I suppose. Blogger Dave Graham has penned a piece, with tongue firmly in cheek, about the various “cloud personality types” that are out there, based on the DSM.

He is still updating the post. So far, my personal favorites are:

“The ‘Cloud Idiot‘ - (cloudiot) - This is the person who thinks they know more about the cloud than anyone else. They’re constantly on the prowl for the ‘what is …?’ questions on social media platforms and provide blustery responses with vapid data validation.  Oftentimes, these folks are proven wrong in a rather humiliating and public fashion.

The ‘Cloud Antagonist‘ - (cloudagonist) - This is the commiserate cloud ‘hater.’  This person loves DAS storage, SANs, divided fabrics and can be found extoling the virtues of direct server management via commandline and a collection of USB sticks.”

He has asked readers to submit their own, and I look forward to seeing the comments field fill up on this one. So far, there has been one, from Matthew Glidden, who suggests the “‘Cloud Evader’ - (cloudaway) Afraid or unwilling to engage clouds and any related topics, evaders check their virtual watch and leave a vapor trail of mumbled excuses. They only bookmarks blogs and twitters that cover safe topics like ‘cuisine’ and ‘roller derby.’ Evaders create fringe attachments to cloudagonists, but keep a safe distance from any emotional opinions, pro or con, lest they disturb the cloud-free status quo. Stopped watching the Weather Channel in mid-2007.”

I encourage one and all to go to Dave’s blog and add more personalities as they come to you. I’m working on one I think I’ll call the “cloud burst…”

My company Ocarina Networks received word this week that Storage Magazine has named us a Storage Management Category finalist in the Storage Magazine Annual Products of the Year Awards.

This is yet another strong validation not only of our business proposition, but of our overall belief that dedupe for online storage–and capacity optimization in general–are becoming must-haves for a wide swath of the business community. This is more true than ever in today’s tough economy.

Our category, “Storage Management Software” is a wide field and the finalists represent everything from EMC’s virtual infrastructure support to Nirvanix’s CloudNAS to Symantec’s storage and virtual server management portal, and so on. The common thread, however, is a focus on getting more from less–whether it’s deduplication for primary, thin provisioning, virtualization, or storage in the cloud, this theme is apparent in just about every entrant.

Thanks to the people at TechTarget and we look forward to announcing that we’ve won the category when the results come out next month.