Five questions to ask when selecting a cloud storage provider

Conceptually, cloud computing refers to service providers providing service IT resources over the Internet, similar to a public paid data center, including computing resources and storage resources. Cloud computing business model at home is not very common at the moment, but the development speed is very fast abroad, more and more companies choose to put the data on the "cloud."

We have reason to believe that the cloud computing business model also has a huge market in the country, but, while the enterprise to enjoy the public IT resources at a phased cost, a problem began to surface: how reliable is the architecture of cloud computing? Is it safe enough to put data on the cloud?

Amazon, Nirvanix and other cloud computing vendors are committed to customers with simple data storage and unlimited upgrades, but the hidden dangers are something we can't ignore, such as disruption of services and security risks.

The temptation from cloud storage

Online file sharing company Freedrive founder Michael Witz is acutely aware that if you need to provide better online file sharing services to users, they need better and more reasonable storage architectures.

"It's not easy to build a separate storage system yourself. That requires a lot of professional knowledge. And those aren't the most powerful places we have, "Witz said." We need to make a choice. We build our own storage architecture and then build it into a sophisticated data center, or outsource these services to a cloud computing service provider, like Nirvanix or Amazon. ”

Obviously the latter solution is more tempting, Witz said. Indeed, cloud storage (sometimes called public computing or utility storage, and so on), for the user, it provides a large network hard disk, for many fast-growing companies, they can rely on the web to deliver services, provide business.

This is why the data can be stored in a Web network through cloud storage, and you can find access to the storage system instead of designing and building your storage system locally. Cloud storage can balance the load between servers and quickly move data between the various data centers to ensure that information is on the most recent storage. This service allows the data to be delivered very quickly to where it needs to be used. Users of cloud storage often do not know exactly where the data they need to access at some point is stored.

The most widely recognized cloud storage service is Amazon's two-year-old simple storage Service (S3). The concept of cloud storage, launched by Nirvanix in October 2007, is also familiar to us; earlier this month, Mosso, a prominent hosting company, also announced that they were providing cloud storage services.

Amazon is not talking about the underlying architecture of its cloud storage, but Nirvanix the case, saying they are using client development software and file system technology to run it on the U.S. East Coast, the west Coast, and in Asia and Europe with 6 of Intel technology-based disk storage. By the end of this year, the company wants to expand its service network to 20. The customer's data will be replicated to 2-3 storage locations. Mosso initially provided cloud storage through its Dallas hosting company data Center, another of their outlets in the UK, and the company said it would also expand its service network significantly in the near future.

Huge cloud

Nirvanix co-founder Geoff Tudor a very vivid comparison of cloud storage and grid services. ' When you turn on the light switch, you don't know where the electricity comes from, ' he said. This is the same as the services that cloud storage provides for you.

Cloud Storage Vendor Overview:

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
March 2006 into the market
MONTHLY fee: 15 cents to store 1GB data
EXTRA cost: 10 cents to 18 cents per 1GB data transmission
Maximum file size: 5GB

Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network
October 2007 into the market
Monthly fee: 1GB data stored 18 cents
EXTRA cost: 18 cents to upload and download 1GB data
Maximum file size: 256GB

The Freedrive company's Witz automatically started using cloud storage services provided by Nirvanix last November. He loved Nirvanix's ability to automatically convert the video format to flash format, and they were able to send data directly to the Freedrive user's hands through cloud storage services. Without the cloud storage service, all data will be deferred by freedrive its own web server.

Witz not detail how much they spent on cloud storage, but said cloud storage helped them save 180,000 of users ' data, and the cost of the service was part of their production costs.

Nirvanix users need to pay 18 cents a month to store 1GB of data, plus 18 cents for additional 1GB data per upload and download; Amazon's S3, which requires 15 cents to store 1GB data per month, plus 10-18 cents for additional 1GB data per transmission. "Customers typically have hundreds of to thousands of users, and if the Web server they use stops working, they will have multiplied the cost of storage per gigabyte without changing the application," says Nirvanix's Tudor.

After a variety of system interruptions, Geezeo's chief technology officer for the personal Finance network, Theron Parlin, felt that the scalability of cloud storage was the most attractive. "We were able to store 50 times times the amount of data currently available in 251GB data and never had a problem, and the overall cost would drop a lot," he said, with great confidence in Amazon S3. (That is, Amazon's flexible extended computing cloud storage)

Amazon and Nirvanix have always been the leaders of cloud storage technology providers, but many of the words in the technology world focus on cloud storage technology and cloud computing technology. Google gave their online storage service an unofficial name gdrive. EMC is said to have prepared a chunk of storage cloud through a technology called Hulk and Maui. IBM, the general architect of storage systems, Clod Barrera, says IBM sees itself as a vendor that provides a variety of tools for cloud storage services, not just Amazon, but a cloud storage service provider.

Treat cloud storage with caution

All of this has turned cloud storage into a more fashionable topic, but Gartner analyst Stan Zaffos warns that if the enterprise uses cloud storage too widely, it will result in the inability of the enterprise to terminate its association with various types of networked access storage, leading to a variety of security risks.

So enterprises should not only care about cloud computing's ability to deliver data to customers via the Internet, but also about where the cloud storage space is allocated to cloud computing applications. In addition, the enterprise must have a clear understanding of cloud storage, he is not without potential problems.

Amazon S3, for example, suffered a few hours of downtime last February, resulting in a large number of users ' web applications off-line. Amazon is shutting down because of the increasing number of authentication requests, and this incident also requires us to significantly improve our certification services and improve our systems so that we can monitor the distribution of the services that have been validated, said Adam Selipsky, vice president of Amazonian network services. Amazon wants to avoid a similar problem, but he also stressed that the system outage did not cause data loss because Amazon's storage has multiple replicas in many places.

The enterprise must also take into account the security of the data and the possibility of being stolen or viewed by unauthorized users. Opus one's senior partner and receptacle World product tester Joel Snyder said, "Whenever you get your data out of your computer room, you're asking for trouble from a safe point of view."

' Your company's data is stored next to your competitor, which is a huge potential risk, ' said Andrew Reichman, an analyst at Forrester. The storage vendor is not fully prepared for secure leasing space for the user, when it comes to adding data, perhaps some enterprise applications should not be allocated to cloud storage, and some providers of cloud storage are aware of what they need to do, but it will take some time to improve these technologies, they are chasing Catch up with the requirements of enterprise applications.

At the same time, some analysts said that cloud storage users need some forward-looking security considerations, can encrypt some sensitive data through SSL encryption to ensure the reliability of data transmission.

Remember that the previous storage vendors lost a lot of customers because of a lot less security, says Andrew Reichman, an analyst at Forrester study, that many of the crisis tasks and high-risk applications do not seem to be in the cloud storage. Reichman adds that the type of delay you have to choose is something you can tolerate, and if you rely on the Internet, sometimes you may have to face it slowly.

' You need to do a cost-benefit analysis between your own storage architecture and the use of cloud storage, and not all cloud storage will cost you less because cloud storage vendors have a total balance to keep them profitable, ' said Zaffos, a Gartner analyst.

Five questions to choose from the cloud storage vendor

In short, cloud storage as a new technology is we need to understand, familiar, but each enterprise environment also has its special requirements, whether to use cloud storage also have different opinions. The following five issues can provide a reference for users when choosing a cloud storage provider.

1. What kind of safety measures do you provide?

Customers want to encrypt their own files, but don't fantasize about each storage provider doing this for us. Therefore, providing the necessary data security and burial measures is the first condition to select a cloud storage provider.

2. Do we have the right to access and audit data?

This permission can help the enterprise to discover any modification of its data and the person who make these changes, no doubt to the user's data security management can play a small role. Amazon.com and Nirvanix can provide this service without charge.

3. Can we choose a certain storage location to store our data?

In some cases, it is more convenient for users to manage their own data by knowing where they are stored. And because of some regulatory requirements, customers must know the exact location of some of their data. For this, some cloud-computing vendors, such as Nirvanix, offer an option to lock data into specific physical locations, but some cloud-computing vendors, such as Amazon, are not available.

4. How long is the downtime we expect?

The users of Amazon's simple storage service had to face hours of downtime one morning last February. Still, cloud services are more secure than users ' own data centers.

5. How do we recover data from a disaster?

Whether you like it or not, disaster always happens. Therefore, the cloud storage vendor must have a real disaster recovery plan to prevent system downtime in the primary data center.