Techno Musings

Over at Network Computing there is a good article discussing how to get primary storage applications utilizing a cloud storage infrastructure, public or private.  George’s discussion hints at a model that would entail a on premise  device making it easy to get data into the cloud.  This device would make it easy for users and applications to interact with the device and without their knowledge move content into the cloud. Within George’s ideal device there are suggestions of caching, file system virtualization and HSM/ILM policies to move the data into and out of the public or a private cloud.  I could not agree more with George’s assertions.   Building a viable public cloud offering is one of the many reasons we purchased Archivas and have worked diligently to integrate our file and content services portfolio into a set of systems and applications that work well together.  One such approach that begins to achieve George’s ideal is the cloud on-ramp.   In this previous post I specifically talk about HNAS-to-HCP integration which in combination forms a cloud on-ramp (HNAS) and ultra modern private cloud store (HCP).  You might be wondering how we were able to do this, well we got requirements from customers and users to turn what were once discrete product offerings (for example Acopia and StorageX at the time) into a feature of the NAS system itself — that is to say file system virtualization, ILM and caching all as features of the NAS device itself.  Well that is what we did, and since the realization of the originating idea in late 2008/early 2009 we expanded and extended it to include using the defacto cloud storage protocol, REST, to talk to HCP.  So voila, we have what the community is seeking, already in play and you will continue to see this idea evolve over time from Hitachi.

UPDATE

There is another article over at Venture Beat that points to this exact same trend.  Namely that cloud data stores may make a lot of sense for distributed workforces such as road warriors sales folk.  However, in the case of larger files and the need for high performance access a hybrid cloud might be what is needed after all as well.  The essential approach that the article cites is analogous to the case of the cloud on-ramp that I describe above.