New York cityscape

New York, “The City That Never Sleeps”. A very fitting moniker for a city that is full of energy and excitement. Servers located in data centers all around the world are constantly crunching numbers and generating analytics in every financial institution in New York. Why are some of these servers located worldwide? Well, for a variety of reasons, but in my humble opinion, it is to ensure that data is always on and always available. After all, we are talking about billions of dollars in capital electronically managed by the New York Stock Exchange alone.

By 2020, it is predicted that there will be at least 20+ billion internet connected devices. As your business grows, so will the amount of data and storage that you will need. We’ll obviously need solutions to protect our data on-premise or in the cloud. A company that can make sure customers data is always on, secure, highly available, and also protected, rules the IoT WORLD.

modern storage requirementsBut in order to serve and protect your data for the always on, always available IoT world, what requirements should we take into account before deploying any data protection or storage solution? If you are a data protection geek, you’ll most likely see some of your requirements being listed on the right. If you are a data protection solutions provider, you guys definitely rock! Data protection solutions such as Commvault, NetBackup, Rubrik, Veeam, etc. are likely the solutions you have in-house to protect your corporate data centers and your mobile devices. These are software-defined and they are designed to be highly available for on-premise or in-the-cloud data protection.

What about storage? What would you consider? I am sure there are many well-known storage providers you can easily name. But with the new kids on the block disrupting the storage market, would lowering your operating costs ($0.005/GB per month) and meeting the above-listed requirements pique your interest?

Amazon S3 and Cloudian
Cloudian is a software-defined storage company. The solution is fully S3 compliant, which means that if you are familiar with Amazon S3, you’ll love the features that comes with this solution. If you are not, as a data protection geek with more than 15 years of experience, I invite you to give Cloudian HyperStore free trial a shot. The features and capabilities of Cloudian HyperStore as a scale-out storage solution with true multi-tenancy is pretty cool in my books. Imagine being able to deploy and grow storage as you need it for your corporate user home directories, backups, archiving, and even object storage for virtualization solutions (i.e. Red Hat OpenStack). The use cases for scale-out storage solutions are vast. There is no more hardware vendor lock-in as you can easily select between the options of a Cloudian HyperStore appliance or commodity servers to roll-your-own scale-out storage with Cloudian HyperStore software.

Imagine that you, as a storage administrator, can easily provide Storage as a Service (STaaS) to all your users. Take a look at the image below. The granular object level management that is available on a per user basis is pretty sweet. I can provide access to my files/objects with read and/or write permissions, with object level ACL and share the object via a public URL access.
Cloudian object level management

To top it all off, I can also limit the maximum number of downloads of that specific object that I want to share. As a service provider, you can also use the analytics inherent in the solution to implement chargeback to your customers on every account that you manage using Cloudian HyperStore smart storage solution.

Best of all, if you decide that you want to move your data to Amazon, use Cloudian Hyperstore’s built-in auto-tiering feature. Dynamically move your data to Amazon S3 if you choose to do so. You don’t have to take my word for it. Cloudian will provide you with a 45-day free trial. Try it out today.