There are plenty of rumours circulating on Twitter (mainly from Netapp employees) speculating on the reasons why this move has been made.  Alex McDonald takes the route of making a Stalinist comparison which does seem slightly over the top, however his job is to be critical of the competition, so this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise.  The main thoughts are that either the service wasn’t making money or there was dessention from partners who also provide Atmos and so EMC were forced to pull their own service to placate their partners.

At the end of the day, only EMC know the answer.

Personally, I’m disappointed to see the service go.  I did some analysis on the API when it was first released and I could see some benefits over both Nirvanix and Amazon’s cloud storage services.

However some questions still remain unanswered.  Hopefully EMC may choose to answer them.

1. According to StorageZilla, Mozy is a big Atmos user.  Does this mean that Mozy will be pushing all their data to be managed through one of their partners or will they retain their own Atmos infrastructure?  If they choose to retain, why would it have been a problem to continue offering Atmos Online if the infrastructure was already there?
2. What plans are there for partners to offer Atmos services in all geographical areas?  Here’s a link to the woefully poor AT&T Storage as a Service offering.  It gives no real detail on what the service is, how to use it, where it is available and so on.  Compare and contrast to Amazon AWS, where I can get full details, documentation and sign up immediately with an Amazon account and a credit card.

I’m not sure relying on partners like AT&T is the best move in the world.  Amazon (and Nirvanix) features and functionality far exceed the Atmos offering.  For once, EMC isn’t the lead player.  They are going to have to work hard to keep up and the move away from offering the Atmos service directly doesn’t allow them to retain control and only looks like a backward move.  I think this means we may be seeing Atmos’ slow death, despite EMC’s protestations otherwise.

Next up was Nirvanix. Nirvanix are a “cloud storage” company, operating in the same space as Amazon S3. After providing an overview of the company, Peter Pistek provided details of CloudNAS 2.0 a software offering which enables a Linux or Windows server to act as a NAS device, storing the data directly in Nirvanix’s cloud. This is a product I’ve reviewed in the past and previously I’ve not been favourable towards it. Expect to see my review of the 2.0 version in the near future.

Day 2 lunch was provided by W Curtis Preston and was followed by “Mr Backup” taking us through his new venture – Truth In IT, a paid-for community portal to assist clients in evaluating storage products (initially backup).

The afternoon was taken up by a trip to Data Robotics, creators of the Drobo storage device. This session was probably my most anticipated of the week and I wasn’t let down. It was superb – for a number of reasons. Firstly, CEO Geoff Barrall took us through the product in more depth, answering some of the questions I’ve always had around the way Drobo’s BeyondRAID technology operates. This will become a post in its own right, expect to read it over the coming week.

The Field Day delegates then split into groups for a practical session, followed by a questionnaire, the winners of which would receive a Drobo each. The winners were; Team #1 – me, Rod, Devang and Simon! Now I have two Drobo devices for my data.

The most anticipated part of the Drobo session was the unveiling of two new Drobo products. Details are under embargo until November 23rd, however I can say the new devices will fill out the Drobo range very nicely. Expect a post on this as the embargo date is reached.

Day 2 wrapped up with dinner at a local italian restaurant and signalled the start of delegate’s long trips home.

In summary, the first Gestalt IT Tech Field Day has been a great success. The presenters have been open with their product information, keen to discuss details and helped to provide a lot of insight into their thinking and strategies. Fortunately, no-one fell into the “marketing slideware” trap. Expect to see posts over the coming weeks and days that delve into some of the details we’ve seen over the last two days. As a group we’ve covered a huge number of topics to even attempt to put into a single post.

Congratulations to Stephen Foskett for setting the event up. A great deal of thanks also need to go to Claire Chaplais and Sunshine Mugrabi, without whom the event wouldn’t have happened. One final thought; where and when will Tech Field Day 2 be?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/33818355@N07/sets/72157622693448519/

Disclaimer/Disclosure: The sponsors and presenters of the Gestalt IT Tech Field Day event have only paid for my accommodation and travel expenses in San Jose during this trip. I am not employed or paid by any of the sponsors/presenters to express my views. I have received a Drobo storage device as part of the competition held at Data Robotics during the Field Day.  I also received a nice Drobo body warmer & T-Shirt and a T-Shirt from 3Par, plus a number of assorted USB memory sticks.

There are a select number of bloggers from the IT community attending (myself included), with interests covering Storage, Networks, Virtualisation and more. The reason the blogging community are interested I think is pretty obvious.  The question is, why would vendors want to do this?

It’s worth taking a step back to look at what the bloggers in question (who also write for GestaltIT) bring to the table.  No doubt there’s the insight and unbiased commentary but probably more important is the ability to access potential customers via a route which traditional marketing can’t deliver.  After all, the bloggers are independent, not paid by the vendors and have built their reputations and followings on this level of impartiality.  Clearly the vendors choosing to present their wares next month both believe in their products and believe that the blogging phenomenon is a better way to get the message out on their products in an impartial manner.

For me personally, I’ll be interested in looking at some technologies I’ve not really seen in detail (Ocarina, Xsigo) plus others I already know. Expect pictures (perhaps some video) and lots of commentary over the course of the two days (November 12/13).

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?

Background

Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage offerings are all about letting someone else deal with the headaches of IT infrastructure management.  By outsourcing to the ”cloud”, organisations may be able to significantly reduce Capital Expenditure and  the Operational costs associated with providing information technology.  Nirvanix have been offering cloud-based storage for some time, mainly through third party channels (companies like Atempo and FreeDrive), but CloudNAS is a direct offering, integrating with a standard Nirvanix account.

The premise of the software is simple; use a standard Windows server as a gateway to virtually unlimited storage in the cloud.  A Windows server (virtual or physical) acts as a standard Windows File Server and therefore storage can be divided out through multiple shares and be integrated into the Active Directory security model.

Testing Testing

I installed the CloudNAS software on a Windows 2008 Server host on my VMware testing farm, meeting the minimum requirements of 2GB of memory and 2Ghz processor.  The installation process requires SDN account details; userid/password and the details of a specific application under SDN created for CloudNAS.  If you’re not familiar with the way SDN works, a user account can have specific applications against which data is stored.  In this instance I created a new dedicated “NAS” application for storing the test data.

Software configuration was pretty simple.  A number of screens requested the SDN Account details and an activation key for the CloudNAS product, then the final screen sets the Drive letter and installation directory.  Once complete and the CloudNAS service started, then the virtual drive (in my case X:) can be shared out.

For my testing I chose to use a configuration mode which writes data to a local cache before uploading to the SDN.  This ensures data is available if the server crashes or is rebooted.  It’s also possible to run in a mode where data is written directly to the SDN as it is written to the virtual drive.  Clearly this is more risky as any data not uploaded would be lost if the server crashed or was rebooted.

In testing, the CloudNAS application seemed to perform well, however  I was only able to do limited performance testing and couldn’t generate a full scalability test with multiple clients.  As data was written to the virtual drive, I was able to monitor the progress via the CloudNAS Monitor tool, which runs on the server.

Under the Hood

I always like to have a little dig around when I install software.  I’m keen to see how it has been written and if certain standards of design have been thought through.  These standards include scalability, performance and usability.  Unfortunately, CloudNAS leaves me with some concerns.

The first thing I noticed was the use of a virtual file system tool called Dokan.  This appears to be the way the SDN CloudNAS file system is emulated under Windows.  Whilst using third-party plug-ins is no bad thing, in this instance it doesn’t appear that Dokan is a commercially supported product.  I would have grave reservations about placing my data under a tool that was dependent on best-efforts home-grown software.

Usability throughout the product is woefully inadequate.  Changes to the configuration parameters requires effectively stepping through the installation process.  The “upload monitor” is a tool running on the server itself and doesn’t even auto refresh.  Probably most disappointing is the lack of a browsable interface into both the local view of the filesystem compared to that in the cloud, with an indication of differences for data not yet uploaded.  

I could find no way to list the files and volume of data already moved up to the cloud.

CloudNAS will not be suitable for certain types of files; data is only uploaded to the cloud when files are closed; there’s no file locking (presumably due to the Dokan implementation).  This could significantly restrict the benefits.

CloudNAS only presents a single virtual drive.  There also doesn’t appear to be any method for moving the local cache to another location (for example on a separate disk).

CloudNAS appears to be a direct Linux port, without Windows design thoughts.  Logging is to flat files which have to be browsed in their target directory.  Configuration parameters have to be edited directly in *.conf files.  The most telling clue is the lack of full conversion of the user manual to Windows, with sloppy references to Unix style directory names, like /var/cache/nirvanix.

Summary

In summary, I’d say what could be a promising product is let down by poor implementation.  The whole user experience hasn’t been thought through fully, leaving the product feeling like a University programming project. A major overhaul is needed.  This should include proper Windows menu driven options settings, an automated refreshing console which displays the local and cloud data structures, plus basics like an indication of the volume of data stored online.  The product needs to be completely refocused on the user experience.  After all, the move to cloud storage is about delivering a service – the back-end technology will be expected to just work;  what will become important in the future as cloud services mature, is usability – unfortunately sadly lacking in this version of the product.