One problem holding back general purpose cloud storage has been the lack of a “standard” way to get data in and out of the cloud.  Most cloud storage providers supply a REST interface, an object file interface or other proprietary ways to use their facilities.  The problem with this is that they all require some [...]

Yesterday, twitterland was buzzing about EMC’s latest enhancement to their Atmos Cloud Storage platform called GeoProtect.  This new capability improves cloud data protection by supporting erasure code data protection rather than just pure object replication.
Erasure coding has been used for over a decade in storage and some of the common algorithms are Reed-Solomon, Cauchy Reed-Soloman, [...]

What would happen if somebody came up with a peer-to-peer cloud (P2P-Cloud) storage or computing service.  I see this as

Operating a little like Napster/Gnutella where many people come together and share out their storage/computing resources.
It could operate in a centralized or decentralized fashion
It  would allow access to data/computing resources anywhere from the internet

Everyone joining the [...]

Cloud storage has emerged  as a viable business service in the last couple of years, but what does cloud storage really do for the data center.  Moving data out to the cloud makes for unpredictable access times with potentially unsecured and unprotected data.  So what does the data center gain by using cloud storage?

Speed – it  often [...]

A recent article from MIT’s Technology Review discussed cloud security (“Security in the Ether”). Most of the article was on how many cloud servers are vulnerable to a particular hack that can uncover private data in server memory/cache. But a good portion of the article was on how to secure data in the cloud [...]

We have posted previously about the need for backup in cloud storage. So today I would like to start a discussion on securing “data-at-rest” within the cloud.
Depositing data into the cloud seems a little like a chinese laundry to me – you deposit data in the cloud and receive a ticket or token used to [...]

When I first heard about cloud storage I wondered just what exactly it was trying to solve. There are many storage problems within the IT shop nowadays days, cloud storage can solve a few of them but introduces more and leaves a few unsolved.
Storage problems solved by cloud storage

Dynamic capacity – storage capacity is [...]

I was talking with a cloud storage vendor the other day and they made an interesting comment, cloud storage doesn’t need to backup data?! They told me that they and most cloud storage providers replicate customer file data so that there is always at least two (or more) copies of customer data residing in [...]

Why all the interest in Scale-out/Cluster File Systems (SO/CFS) and why now?
Why now is probably easiest to answer, valuations are down. NetApp is migrating GX to their main platform, IBM continues to breath life in GPFS, HP buys IBRIX, and now LSI buys ONStor. It seems every day brings some new activity with [...]

DataDirect Networks (DDN) announced this week a new product offering private cloud services. Apparently the new Web Object Scaler (WOS) is a storage appliance that can be clustered together across multiple sites and offers a single global file name space across all the sites. Also the WOS cloud supports policy file replication and [...]