Does Cloud Provide Infinite Storage Capacity and Retention?

I wrote last week about the challenges of long-term retention of data, and some of the architectural considerations and decisions we take in designing long-term backup or archive solutions. The follow-up question therefore is, does the cloud provide infinite storage capacity and retention?

“Cloud Integration”

One of the key themes which I have been seeing of late with many (if not all!) modern storage solutions, is some form of cloud integration. It seems to me that many vendors are trying to ensure they can tick the “cloud integration” check box in an RFP or RFI!

I recall one time at a previous organisation, our storage team did an RFP asking for an array which was capable of doing file presentation. The response in the RFP was “Yes”, but when this was dug into a bit further (after the fact), it turned out that this was only possible with an HA pair of custom vendor file gateways. In other words, not much better than building your own file server!

Anyway back to the point, this “RFP checkbox” mentality means that some vendors have a very tight cloud integration with multiple target replication options (such as DC to DC, DC to Cloud, Cloud to DC, Cloud to Cloud, etc), whilst others provide little more than lip service to cloud integration.

The best suggestion I can make in this scenario is to push your vendor for either a demo, a PoC, or a software copy of their array, if they have one. That way you can be absolutely sure that what is claimed, is indeed what you are looking for!

One Possible Solution… EMC Unity

One solution I believe falls more and more into the cloudy camp with each code release, is the new EMC Unity arrays, for which we were provided a briefing at the recent Storage Field Day 13 event.

What I found particularly interesting was that the arrays were natively capable of up to 256 redirect-on-write snapshots per volume, which sounds like a lot, but if you do one every 5 minutes then you will run out pretty fast! By utilising the EMC Cloud Tiering Appliance (a totally separate management interface today, which I really hope EMC fully integrate into the Unity pretty quick, as multiple panes of glass are no fun for anyone!), we can utilise any S3-compatible storage to provide UNLIMITED snapshots.unlimited snapshot retention

This is pretty cool if you have to provide very granular restoration points for your application data, as well as the ability to off-site at relatively low cost in a near-infinite data storage facility!

Sadly, you can’t currently run VMs directly from those snapshots in the cloud, but bearing in mind that EMC has a software only version of the Unity already available, I have a sneaking suspicion that there will be some engineering talent working on this as we speak! This would potentially provide the ability to snap and replicate your entire estate natively to S3 buckets in the cloud, then restore very quickly locally within that IaaS platform. Let’s hope I’m right!

Want to Know More?

EMC’s sessions on Unity, Scale-IO and Isilon were recorded and are now available to stream online:

Some of the other SFD13 delegates had their own thoughts on the session and EMC in general. You can find them here:

Disclaimer/Disclosure: My flights, accommodation, meals, etc, at Storage Field Day 13 were provided by Tech Field Day / Gestalt IT, but there was no expectation or request for me to write about any of the vendors products or services and I was not compensated in any way for my time at the event.

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