Cloudian Moves Private Cloud Beyond Backup

In a data protection application, Cloudian acts as a backup target. To excel in this role, the system of course needs to be scalable, fast, and cost effective. But most importantly, it must ensure that data is never, ever corrupted or lost. Fortunately, data durability was the #1 design goal of Cloudian HyperStore.

Storage Switzerland recently wrote a product analysis of our HyperStore solution, and the verdict is very positive. Read on to understand why Cloudian is “an ideal storage target for backups and archives” and “a system that organizations should seriously consider for all their storage needs.”

Effective Backup and Archive

In a data protection application, Cloudian acts as a backup target. To excel in this role, the system of course needs to be scalable, fast, and cost-effective. But most importantly, it must ensure that data is never, ever corrupted or lost. Fortunately, data durability was the #1 design goal of Cloudian HyperStore. Our HyperStore object storage solution offers robust data protection features that can protect your data from incidents of all kinds, including drive failure, node failure, even the failure of an entire data center, if that’s the level you require.

Features that support our 14-nines data durability include:

  • Erasure coding
  • Data replication across nodes or across sites
  • Hybrid cloud integration, that enables replication to the public cloud
  • Proactive repair
  • Data GPS, which helps you locate objects
  • Repair-on-Read, which automatically checks replicas for missing or out-of-date copies and then replaces or updates them
  • Smart Redirect, which creates a local cache replication as well as an Amazon S3 copy

Beyond backup applications, Cloudian HyperStore can play multiple other roles within your data center.

 

Multiple Applications, One Storage Pool

Other Cloudian use cases include:

  • NAS file server offload
  • Media archive management
  • File sync and share storage

Because Cloudian is a scale-out cluster, all of these can co-exist in a single, limitlessly scalable namespace.

We offer both a software solution and multiple hardware appliances which let you start with a small deployment (a few dozen TBs) and then scale up to multiple PBs and beyond.

 

AI and Machine Learning: The Future of Object Storage

Soon you will be seeing object storage widely used in the next big storage driver: data pools that support AI and Machine Learning. Object is ideal for this due to its scalability and integrated metadata support.

Check out the Storage Switzerland piece to learn more. You can read the full piece here or check out our solutions.

 

5 Reasons to Adopt Hybrid Cloud Storage for your Data Center

Are you weighing the benefits of cloud storage versus on-premises storage? If so, the right answer might be to use both–and not just in parallel, but in an integrated way. Hybrid cloud is a storage environment that uses a mix of on-premises and public cloud services with data mobility between the two platforms.

IT professionals are now seeing the benefit of hybrid solutions. According to a recent survey of 400 organizations in the U.S. and UK conducted by Actual Tech, 28 percent of firms have already deployed hybrid cloud storage, with a further 40 percent planning to implement within the next year. The analyst firm IDC agrees: In its 2016 Futurescape research report, the company predicted that by 2018, 85 percent of enterprises will operate in a multi-cloud environment.

Hybrid has piqued interest as more organizations look to the public cloud to augment their on-premises data management. There are many drivers for this, but here are five:

  1. We now have a widely-accepted standard interface.

The emergence of a common interface for on-prem and cloud storage changes everything. The world of storage revolves around interface standards. They are the glue that drives down cost and ensures interoperability. For hybrid storage, the defacto standard is the Amazon S3 API, an interface that began in cloud storage and is now available for on-premises object storage as well. This standardization is significant because it gives storage managers new flexibility to deploy common tools and applications on-prem and in the cloud, and easily move data between the two environments to optimize cost, performance, and data durability.

  1. Unprecendented hybrid scalability delivers operational efficiency.

Managing one large, scalable pool of storage is far more efficient than managing two smaller ones. And hybrid storage is hands-down the most scalable storage model ever devised. It combines on-prem object storage – which is itself scalable to hundreds of PBs – with cloud storage that is limitlessly scalable, for all practical purposes. This single-pool storage model reduces data silos, and simplifies management with a single namespace and a single view — no matter where the data originated or where it resides. Further, hybrid allows you to keep a copy of all metadata on-premises, ensuring rapid search across both cloud and on-premise data.

  1. Best-of-breed data protection is now available to everyone.

Data protection is fundamental to storage. A hybrid storage model offers businesses of all sizes incredible data protection options, delivering data durability that previously would have been affordable to only the most well-heeled storage users. In a hybrid configuration, you can backup data to object storage on premises, then automatically tier data to the cloud for long-term archive (Amazon Glacier, Google Coldline, Azure Blob). This gives you two optimal results: You have a copy of data on-site for rapid recovery when needed, and a low-cost, long-term archive offsite copy for disaster recovery. Many popular backup solutions including Veritas, Commvault and Rubrik provide Amazon S3 connectors that enable this solution as a simple drop-in.

  1. Hybrid offers more deployment options to match your business needs.

Your storage needs have their own nuances, and you need the operational flexibility to address them. Hybrid can help with more deployment options than other storage models. For the on-premise component, you can select from options that range from zero-up-front cost software running on the servers you already own, to multi-petabyte turnkey systems. For the cloud component, a range of offerings meet both long-term and short-term storage needs. Across both worlds, a common object storage interface lets you mix-and-match the optimal solution. Whether the objective is rapid data access on-premises or long-term archival storage, these needs can be met with a common set of storage tools and techniques.

  1. Hybrid helps meet data governance rules.

External and internal data governance rules play a big part in data storage planning.  In a recent survey, 59% of respondents reported the need to maintain some of their data on premises. On average, that group stated that only about half of their data can go to the cloud. Financial data and customer records in particular are often subject to security, governance and compliance rules, driven by both internal policy and external regulation. With a hybrid cloud model, you can more easily accommodate the changing needs. With hybrid, you can set policies to ensure compliance, tailoring migration and data protection rules to specific data types.

While many are seeing the natural advantages of hybrid, some are still unsure. What other factors play in that I haven’t mentioned? With more and more being digitized and retained into perpetuity, what opportunities is your organization exploring to deal with the data deluge?

Shifting Technology Habits and the Growth of Object Storage

Technology is, for many of us, a vital and inextricable part of our lives. We rely on technology to look up information, keep in touch with friends and family, monitor our health, entertain ourselves, and much more.

space

However, technology wasn’t always so ubiquitous – it wasn’t too long ago that our wireless phones had limited features and even fewer users actually using these features. Here’s the breakdown from 2004, according to a study from the Yankee Group:

This means that just over 10 years ago, less than 50% of cell phones had internet access and less than 10% had cameras. Even with 50% of phones having internet access, only 15% of users took advantage of this feature.

pew research center

By contrast, look at this survey conducted by Pew Research in 2014:

Among the 18-29 age group, text messaging and internet are more frequently used features than phone calls, which is indicative of the tremendous shift in technology use over the past few years. This study doesn’t even cover a major feature that many users use their phones for: pictures. As younger users turn almost exclusively to smartphone cameras for their photos (and, of course, #selfies), they turn to photo-sharing sites to host and display their images.

Photos are just one type of the ever-growing deluge of unstructured data, though. For enterprises, unstructured data also includes emails, documents, videos, audio files, and more. In order for companies to cost-effectively store this data (while keeping it protected and backed up for end-users), many of them are starting to turn to object storage over traditional network-attached storage (NAS).

Some of the benefits of object storage include a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and the ability to easily scale up as data needs grow. That by itself is not enough, though. With a solution like our very own HyperStore, in addition to the affordable price (as low as 1c per GB per month) and infinite scalability (from tens of terabytes to hundreds of petabytes), we offer easy management and access control, plus strong data protection with both erasure coding and replication settings. You can read about all of HyperStore’s features and benefits here.

Unstructured data use is only going to continue to grow. Smartphones and other data-intensive technologies will only become more prevalent, and you’ll want to be prepared to meet that growth. Learn more about Cloudian’s hardware and software solutions today.

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