IBM & Friends Tackle Future Of Cloud Storage

IBM has announced plans to develop a smart cloud storage architecture over the next three years. The EU-funded joint research initiative, estimated at $21.5M, involves 15 European partners. Called VISION Cloud -- Virtualized Storage Services for the Future Internet - the group plans to develop a new approach, where data is represented by smart objects that include rich information describing the content of the data and how the object should be handled, replicated, or backed up.

Scientists at IBM Research in Haifa, Israel will lead the project. The partners include IT technology, business software, and service providers SAP AG, Siemens Corporate Technology, Engineering and ITRicity, telecommunications providers Telef??nica Investigaci??n y Desarrollo, Orange Labs and Telenor, media service providers RAI and Deutche Welle, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), Europe standards organization, and universities National Technical University of Athens, Umea University, Swedish Institute of Computer Science and University of Messina.

Yaron Wolfsthal, senior manager, IBM Research, Haifa, says there are four concepts that will be developed for the architecture: a rich object data model, execution of computations close to the stored content, content-centric access, and full data interoperability.

The new architecture is needed because we are being buried in data, he says. According to IBM, we created as much as 150 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data in 2005. This year, we will create 1,200 exabytes. "For the last couple of years, most companies are generating data faster than they can store it."

Joe Clabby, Clabby Analytics, says this venture is similar to the European Grid Initiative, how the Europeans use grids/clouds to find unused computing power and exploit it. "This new initiative is all about doing the same sort of thing -- but for storage. And it has some interesting additional elements such as the creation of storage objects and the creation of a centralized metadata database that essentially points to the data that people are seeking. And it has a security element (our biggest concern with clouds, just like with grids, is how do you secure data that is held in a public, open location)."Analyst Charles King, Pund-IT, calls this an "anticipatory initiative" in that it assumes that as Internet usage continues to evolve, consumers and businesses will use the Web to access, consume and store increasingly complex "rich" data objects and resources including photos, videos, health records and financial records. "Creating the sophisticated data storage architectures and infrastructure capable of supporting rich data is the aim of the Vision Cloud initiative, and IBM and its partners should be applauded for the scope of this effort. But while its aims are laudable, achieving the Vision Cloud will depend both on the collaborative innovation IBM and its partners can bring to the effort in the short term, and how successful they are at bringing in additional partners, service providers and enterprise customers over time."

The issue of the data explosion in the cloud is a very serious problem as more companies expand their use of cloud computing, notes analyst Judith Hurwitz, Hurwitz & Associates. "Companies are looking to integrate data across public and private cloud (such as SaaS applications such as Salesforce.com etc. and various other packaged SaaS offering in finance, HR, etc.) with the data that they are managing in their private clouds and within the data centers." In terms of storage, it is a critical issue, she says, with storage expanding at an even greater pace in the cloud than in an on-premises implementation.

Over the next 6-12 months, IBM will work on the architecture, and work with the stakeholders to ensure they have a concise, coherent architecture that meets their needs. Once that's finalized, Wolfsthal says they will incrementally roll out the various technologies that will lead to full-blown implementation. During the last 18 months the group will start with use-case demonstrations, working with the various partners to test the architecture against their workloads.