The Storage Behind The Cloud

The storage behind the Cloud matters. While many Cloud Services have service-level agreements (SLAs), the only thing that SLA is good for if your provider is down and can't return you to operations quickly is a lawsuit. Ask what these providers have in the back end for both their storage and recovery processes. Make sure they are using products that have a track record of being cost effective, redundant and reliable. You might be surprised at the answers.

For example, I was having lunch with the storage administrator of a local insurance company and we were talking about Cloud Services. His view was recently soured. One of the Cloud Services they were using had an outage, broke their SLA and the insurance company was without an important, not critical, service for almost two days. It turns out the provider of the service was running the application on internally installed RAID-5 and they had a double drive failure. Up until that point the storage administrator had never asked what was the storage behind the cloud. The only form of recovery for the provider was from tape, it took two days to order in new drives, install them in the area and recovery the application.

Despite horror stories like this, Cloud Computer and Storage Services are going to be successful and eventually almost every organization will use them in some fashion or another. They may use it for backup data or archive data, they may even use it as primary storage. If your business is using any of the software-as-a-service offerings like salesforce.com, you already are storing primary data in the Cloud. It is the storage behind the Cloud that concerns me. What these providers use is often hidden from you -- you don't know what your data is being stored on. I want to know, so should you.

Many Cloud Providers I talk to, especially ones that are providing software-as-a-service as opposed to storage-as-a-service, are treating storage as an afterthought! That is terrifying. In many cases, the storage "platform" was some big Linux or even God forbid Windows server with a bunch of cheap, direct-attached storage. Their backup strategies are not well thought out and, believe it or not, many have no replication outside of the primary host. The lack of some form of data replication out of the box is what ruined my lunch companion's attitude toward the Cloud.

In fairness, some of the Cloud Providers are using either tried and true technologies from companies like Permabit, Nexsan and EMC Atmos that deliver scale and high availability while still providing cost efficiencies. Others are using Cloud specific storage software like those from Bycast, Mezeo and Parascale. 3Par and Isilon have done well in software-as-a-service where performance, reliability and rapid scaling are critical.

It is the ones that don't have a defined storage strategy that concern me. They are either trying to invent a storage system on their own or totally ignoring the importance of data storage and protection. One provider actually told me that their protection strategy was to copy (manually) to other servers whenever they got around to it!

Cloud Providers please be forewarned, when briefing me, my first questions are going to be what storage are you using, what are your SLAs and how are you insuring that you will be able to meet them? And I will be letting readers know who you are and how you answer. (Note, I expect some openings in my briefing calendar over the next few weeks.)

-- George Crump is founder of Storage Switzerland , which provides strategic consulting and analysis to storage users, suppliers, and integrators. Prior to Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest integrators.

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