Archiving to the Cloud

Arthur Cole spoke with Bobby Moulton, president, Seven10 Storage Software. The more people look into it, the more the cloud is emerging as a backup and archiving solution rather than a simple data storage platform. The top cloud providers are all touting their cost-effectiveness and flexibility when it comes to providing storage resources, but the trend is drawing in a large number of third-party archival solutions focused on leveraging that flexibility and scalability to their (and your) advantage. One such group is Seven10 Storage Software. President Bobby Moulton explains some ways the cloud surpasses current archival platforms.

Cole: Recent research seems to indicate that there is more interest in the cloud as a backup solution than as a general-purpose storage platform. What are some of the advantages the cloud has over local or even traditional online backup solutions?

Moulton: Primarily, it is important to understand the type of data that is being stored in the cloud. Almost all industry experts believe that cloud storage is an ideal medium for maintaining online, long-term, unstructured content. This sentiment has been echoed by the end user and early cloud adopters. As such, we should properly position cloud as a tier in the next-generation intelligent archive. The role of backup is data protection for transactional or transitional content, a different beast entirely. We need to begin to use proper terminology when discussing today’s data storage practices. As we all know, backup is not an archive.

With that said, many of the organizations we deal with want their archive data to be replicated across more than one target for redundancy, high availability and DR purposes. In these environments, it is common to have one copy stored on Fibre Channel disk and another copy available on less-expensive, longer-term storage media such as EMC Centera, tape/VTL, or the cloud. This way, if a storage layer were compromised, customer data would still be available from the second or third target.

Cloud archiving has a number of benefits over traditional backup. There is no need to acquire expensive silos of changers and media, nor software to tie it all together, and it offers the ability to pay for only the storage needed at the end of any given month. It also provides offsite capability without the need to commit personnel, internal or external, to the process. Zero management is needed by customer’s internal resources of the storage since only the gateway needs to be monitored for access. As well, mirrored or replicated data can be online at all times -- this is frequently called active archives -- even though the data is stored offsite, so there is no more asking the IT department to find that old tape. And with proactive data placement and a tiered archive, the result is few copies of data being generated by legacy backup applications that are used to create daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly copies of data that, in most cases, is unchanging or static.

Cole: Scalability is a key advantage in the cloud, naturally, but how do providers like Seven10 accommodate other backup functions like search and retrieval?

Moulton: Again, for the purposes of this discussion, let’s make sure that we differentiate from backup and instead use the phrase intelligent active archiving. The key here is active. We don’t have the typical issues that backup does, such as grooming, quota management, off-shelf media management, etc., because we keep all content online while tiering makes sure that specific data characteristics match the storage characteristics of where such data resides. EMC is famous for its tagline: “Where information lives” - but what they don’t tell you is the directions on how to get there and once there, whether or not you can afford the rent. StorFirst EAS is a customer installable, file system gateway to the cloud. The gateway provides a cached metadata database which describes data. These databases store fractions of the total size of information in the files for search. Since we’re an archive, we’re trying to reduce the cost of primary storage the customer has to monitor, therefore we don’t want an inactive file to return to primary storage. Retrieval is as simple as reading the file from the gateway.

Cole: How do you address the security and availability issues that seem to dog cloud solutions?

Moulton: The Seven10 StorFirst EAS gateway metadata server fits right into the customer’s existing Active Directory network, so any internal security procedures, such as Microsoft’s Access Control Lists (ACLs), can be applied to it. Data sent over the wire can be optionally encrypted in transit using technologies like SSL, or the customer can install a VPN between them and the provider’s site. Data can also be optionally encrypted at rest using industry standard AES algorithms, and since the key manager is installed at the customer’s site, there is no way for anyone to make sense of the data even if by some slip of process they gain access to the data outside the organization.

And remember, we are a facilitator to cloud storage by providing unfettered access via an easy-to-implement, enterprise gateway. However, once the data comes to rest in the cloud, we concede to the security and control measures provided by our cloud partners. This is the beauty of StorFirst. It doesn’t claim to be all things to all people, but what it does provide is a gateway into storage that is the most scalable, secure and flexible option possible.

At the end of the day, we believe that the infrastructure provided by trusted solutions from EMC and other established names are more than we could ever provide or care to compete with. These guys know storage and they know what their customers want. They also know what they want in a partner, which is why Seven10 makes sure that cloud access is maximized across the enterprise.