Now, it’s no secret that I’m keen on the idea of Cloud Computing (and to be more precise, cloud storage in particular), so the concept of evolving standardisation is extremely exciting.  Last year, I discussed RAIC (here and here) – the concept of using multiple clouds to form a redundant repository.

Too Early?

Whilst on the one hand I agree with Stephen that it may be too early for standards to be set, I would also contend that for certain pieces of the cloud storage infrastructure we do need standards, for example security and authentication.  It would be useful to have a consistent authentication model to be applied across cloud storage infrastructures, especially if in the future the ultimate evolution of cloud storage (and for that matter cloud computing) is the ability to dynamically switch workloads and data locations based on service quality (i.e. cost and performance) and availability.

Of course, there will always be the eternal tradeoff between standardisation (which suits the customer) and proprietary interfaces and functionality (which suits the vendor).  Get a customer hooked into proprietary technology and the inertia to change becomes much increased, so even if another vendor does offer a better solution, the cost and effort of change is too great to make the savings/benefits worthwhile.

New Business

Does this mean initiatives like Zend and Cloudloop offer an insight into new business opportunities?  I think they do.  Most, if not all of us will not interface directly with Amazon S3, Nirvanix, Atmos, Rackspace and the others that will spring up.  These companies are infrastructure, not application, providers.  Taking the UK as an example, do I care where or how my electricity is generated or where my gas comes from, as long as it is available when I need it?  No.  Whether the cloud storage infrastructure providers (CSIP) choose to standardise isn’t important.  The future is how easily we can interface into the cloud, and how services such as the following can be easily delivered:

• Create/Retrieve/Update/Delete (CRUD)
• Search
• Index
• Migrate

and of course the influencing factors will be:

• Cost
• Availability
• Performance

Today there are plenty of companies offering services based on cloud storage – exclusively targeting the consumer market or limited business features such as backup.  As things evolve, we’ll see opportunities to move into the Enterprise space.  These will take advantage of extending the data space into the cloud, giving us new and interesting ways of managing data.  Here are some ideas I want to explore in upcoming posts:

• Extending the Global Name Space into the Cloud
• Block-based array tiering and the Storage Cloud
• Using the Storage Cloud for data migration
• Archive, Backup and the storage cloud

Anyone have their own ideas they want to share?

Now, don’t forget I’m a fan of the concept of cloud storage, but I also think that we need better data availability models to cope with the failure of a single provider (I wrote a series of posts on this starting here).  However, reading the comments on the TechCrunch site, one entry from Chris Walker made me think that people aren’t understanding the way IT works:

“I believe data stores in S3 auto-replicates across multiple data centers so theoretically you should not encounter a data loss like this one – unless all of amazons data centers get nuked.”

Data loss is not purely a hardware failure issue.  Information is lost for many reasons; whether that’s malicious data destruction, lack of forethought on IT design, a rolling disaster, failure in replication, or something else, you can’t assume just because data exists in multiple locations that it will be 100% safe.  

Data security is as much about process as it is the technology.  Here’s a few questions to ask:

• Is my data replicated in real-time (so if I delete/corrupt it, I ruin all copies)?
• Is my data saved in snapshots (helps prevent the above issue)?
• Is my data secured on multiple technology platforms (e.g. primary, secondary and/or tape storage)?
• How is my data being replicated (tools and process)?
• How can I prove my data has been backed up/replicated successfully?
• What level of user/electronic/physical security is in place?

Unfortunately, the appeal of online storage services today is the low cost and ease of use.  Perhaps we should also be giving more weight and consideration to the value of our data before we commit to using these services; it may then be worth paying a little more to get a more resilient service, or to insure against the consequential losses of losing valuable data.