Rhm2ktmi's List: Cloud - Storage

• To fully leverage the power of the cloud and cloud storage, businesses in many industries and of all sizes must move massive files into (and out of) the cloud, creating technical challenges for IT. Traditional methods of transferring data are no longer sufficient.

• Sales price is important but is just a portion of the total picture that really comes to play at scale.
• When talking to object storage customers, we find the landscape is really divided into two camps
• Those that understand that object storage can be a feature rich solution architected to address a broad set of use cases
• Those that take a narrow view and implement systems that rely on distributed erasure coding to create a primarily low cost solution with few features, low performance, and which are highly network dependent (latency impacts/limits performance). In short, the only feature here is $/GB.

2 more annotations...

• For over a decade, our innovative technology has been proven and in-production, Resolving Big Data storage challenges in the worlds largest & most demanding environments.    

• Software-defined storage (SDS) conforms to the real needs of IT customers who are looking to optimize their infrastructure at the lowest capex and opex. Infrastructure must meet the requirements of applications.

• SDS abstracts software functionality from the hardware. It logically supports various physical or virtualized servers. It virtualizes all underlying storage systems and storage networking to a common abstraction layer and federates all types of storage systems into a single “virtual” scale-out storage offering unified automation, orchestration, provisioning, and management capabilities at the individual virtual machine (VM) level, while providing a central point of access to management functions.

   

• With large and distributed data sets, storage for big data is a huge challenge. Data can be collected, stored, and distributed from in-house, on-premise, and in-cloud sources.
• Enterprises that want to take advantage of big data must set the stage with a framework that enables large-scale object storage systems to be deployed.
• While open-source storage software offers many advantages, potential customers should balance the criticality of their enterprise data against the emergent nature of open-source solutions.
• A major drawback of open-source solutions is that while the software is free, the hardware is not, and neither are support and maintenance, which can total 70 percent of an IT budget. Capex may fall marginally, but opex could rise dramatically.
• Ultimately, open-source software, particularly as it relates to object storage systems, is best used when the open-source project has a specific feature that addresses a glaring issue lessening the enterprise’s ability to generate value or competitive advantage.

3 more annotations...

• Over the past few years, one of the most common areas of inquiry has involved the use of enterprise file sync and share (EFSS). The inquiries range widely in theme, but the most common question we at 451 are asked is: "What are other firms like ours doing with EFSS today?"
• This report aims to offer a broad but relevant answer to that question
• EFSS is one of the most hyped technologies of the past decade. It is a relatively straightforward technical function – sharing files anywhere at any time – that has exploded into a temporary marketplace populated by more than 100 technology vendors.
• We see four particularly strong use cases for EFSS emerging late this year
• SharePoint/File Server successor
• Enterprise mobility application development
• Remote workforce enablement
• Large file transfer replacement
• Currently, we see four particular challenge areas that almost all enterprises face when considering EFSS (over time, as vendor offerings mature, these concerns will likely change)
• Lack of controls – Both public and private organizations need to have visibility into what their employees are doing. They need to be able to provision and de-provision user accounts and access rights.
• Security – EFSS vendors have been falling over backwards the past year to boost and boast about their security credentials. They had little choice but to do so because there have been multiple EFSS system security breaches.
• Compliance – Like it or not, enterprises need to adhere to industry-specific, corporate and regulatory compliance needs. We can argue that some of these needs are outdated, but it doesn't matter; they have to be adhered to regardless.
• The 80-20 Rule – In some ways, the biggest challenge for enterprises considering the strategic deployment of an EFSS system is the 80-20 rule, which states that only 20% of a firm's data is really of value and needs to be closely managed.

11 more annotations...

• In recent conversations regarding solutions to implement for data privacy, our Dynamic Data Masking team put together the following table to highlight the differences between encryption / tokenization and Dynamic Data Masking (DDM).  Best practices dictate that both should be implemented in an enterprise for the most comprehensive and complete data security strategy.  For the purpose of this blog, here are a few definitions:

   

• InfoQ: What are the primary use cases for using a Riak database compared to a relational database as well as compared to other NoSQL databases?

• Riak is purpose-built for soft, real-time systems where availability is a priority. Use cases include (but are not limited to):

   
   
  • Session Storage
   
  • User Data storage
   
  • S3-like services
   
  • Cloud infrastructure
   
  • Scalable, low-latency storage for mobile apps
   
  • Critical Data Storage and Disaster Proof Medical Data (see Denmark Healthcare use case)
   
  • Building Block for custom-built distributed systems
   
   
• We tend to see people switching to Riak from MYSQL and Oracle when they a) were forcing a key/value data model into them, b) need to reduce costs, c) need to get away from a fragile scale-out model based on sharding or d) all of the above.
• Cassandra is somewhat similar, but it's more suited for applications that don't require the flexible consistency that Riak offers
• What type of data persistence and data management patterns does Riak support?
• We place a lot of importance on persistence and predictability. To that end, we support pluggable backends that are suitable for different use cases.
• default storage engine is Bitcask
• we support Google's LevelDB
• Can you talk about some limitations about the Riak databases and what use cases it's not the best solution to use?
• Applications that require ad-hoc querying and heavy analytics tend to be less of a good fit for Riak.
• What are some best practices and gotchas that the application architects and developers should keep in mind when working on applications that access the data stored in Riak databases?

9 more annotations...

• This paradigm promises tremendous cost savings and efficiencies, but in order to deliver on these promises, they demand a keen understanding of the underlying tenets which make them possible and the critical technological and process drivers necessary to exploit them. 
• In the world of Atmos, we have synthesized these tenets into three key principles: Scale, Utilization and Variable Cost, and we’ve internalized them as the foundation on which we build our technology.

• At its core, GridBank is a software-based object storage platform that is hardware agnostic – it can use SAN, NAS or DAS storage, or even span private and public storage clouds – and is 'infinitely' scalable to manage petabytes of data. A global namespace capability allows geo-dispersed data to be managed centrally, with a range of archiving, data migration, replication, disaster recovery, search, e-discovery and analytics facilities built in.