Chris Evans

At the end of August 2012, Amazon Web Services released their latest service offering – a long-term archive service called Glacier.  As a complement to their existing active data access service S3, Glacier provides long term storage for “cold” data – information that has to be retained for a long time but doesn’t require frequent access. What Exactly is Glacier? Many organisations need to retain data in archive format for extended periods of time.  This is for regulatory or compliance purposes or may simply be part of their normal business process.  Good examples are medical, healthcare, financial or media (video and audio) data.  Typically for many IT departments, backup has provided a lazy way of archiving information.  Access to backups retained for up to 10 years provides a cheap and rudimentary archive service.  However backup isn’t archive (see my recent art... (more)

HP Cloud Now Available In Beta – A First Look

HP have joined the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) market and released their HP Cloud service in public beta.  Here’s the announcement press release.  The services on offer are: Available Now as Public Beta Compute – on-demand server instances. Cloud Object Storage – object-based storage using RESTful APIs. Content Delivery Network – local distribution of web content. Still in Private Beta Cloud Block Storage – persistent data for compute images Relational Database for MySQL – managed cloud databases There’s also the HP Identity Service for managing key & token access managem... (more)

APIs: Essential for Delivering Storage in Enterprise Cloud Infrastructures

It’s pretty easy to pick holes in the current legacy storage products, especially when it comes to integration within both public and private cloud deployments.  However it’s worth discussing exactly what is required when implementing cloud frameworks, as the way in which storage is deployed is radically different from the traditional model of storage operations.  In this post we will look at why traditional methods of storage management need to change and how that affects the way in which the hardware itself is used.  This leads to a discussion on APIs and how they are essential... (more)

Is Google Drive Too Late to the Party?

Like many people, the other week I downloaded and installed Google Drive.  This is the long-awaited competitor to services like Dropbox and Microsoft’s SkyDrive, offering free online storage with the ability to upgrade to higher capacity at a cost.  Dropbox and the various other lookalikes have been around for some time, so is Google coming to this market too late and is the party already over? Cloud Storage The concept of Cloud Storage is pretty simple.  Services like Dropbox allow you to share a local folder on your PC or Mac and have that data replicated into “the cloud”.  Fr... (more)

How Viable Is Cloud Storage?

This week has seen announcements from two companies I’ve been interested in and following for some time. Nasuni Nasuni makes a storage appliance that stores all of a customer’s data in “the cloud”.  It’s available either as a physical device (effectively a server running their software) or as a virtual machine.  What makes their product interesting is that both the data and filer configuration reside on the cloud and can be reconstituted anywhere if for some reason the filer is lost (for example if the appliance is down or power was lost).  The only piece of data the customer ne... (more)