IBM Stakes its Cloud Storage Claim

There are several industry organizations and vendors hard at work developing cloud storage standards and the race is on to determine how data will be moved and secured in the cloud. The most recent race entrant in this race is a little company called IBM.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today launched a joint research initiative of 15 European partners to develop a so-called “smart cloud storage architecture.” The effort centers on delivering storage services within and across cloud boundaries through a better understanding what’s inside the data.

The EU-funded initiative, called VISION Cloud – Virtualized Storage Services for the Future Internet, has been formed to develop a new approach to cloud storage, where data is represented by smart objects that include information describing the content of the data and how the object should be handled, replicated, or preserved. The end game is to improve delivery of data and storage services across boundaries of countries and vendors (See Alan Earls’ recent piece for Enterprise Storage Forum, “Could Borders Bring the Cloud Down to Earth?” for more on that subject).

The VISION Cloud storage cloud architecture concept combines (a) a rich object data model, (b) execution of computations close to the stored content, (c) content-centric access, and (d) full data interoperability.

The VISION Cloud initiative will be spearheaded by scientists at IBM Research in Haifa, Israel, and supported by partners, including SAP AG, Siemens Corporate Technology, Engineering and ITRicity, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo, Orange Labs and Telenor, RAI and Deutche Welle, the SNIA Europe standards organization. The National Technical University of Athens, Umea University, Swedish Institute of Computer Science and University of Messin, will also contribute to the effort.

A noble effort, to be sure, but Big Blue has some big vendors trying to make their architectures and delivery methods the de facto storage standards in the cloud.

Oracle staked its own claim to the cloud in recent weeks when the computer giant proposed the Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model API, which covers the common elements of a cloud implementation by specifying the relevant machines, storage volumes and networks. Specifically, the spec submitted to the DMTF describes how a machine can be provisioned from an image; how a volume can be attached to a machine; and how a machine can connect to a network (see “Oracle Proposes Cloud Management Standard”).

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) said the goal of its proposal is to encourage open standards, noting the Oracle Cloud API follows the Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture style and uses HTTP methods to interact with the resources to achieve provisioning, associating, modifying, and retiring of entities.

Meanwhile, the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) has been quietly putting in work via the SNIA Cloud Storage Initiative (CSI). The CSI recently completed work on its first cloud standard, the CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface). The CDMI provides standards for the data path to clouds, includes the ability to manage service levels that data receives when it is stored in the cloud, and includes a common interoperable data exchange format for securely moving data and its associated data requirements between clouds.

The CDMI is based on a RESTful HTTP protocol, and requires providers to implement stringent access controls and encryption of data for security purposes. The standard enables developers to mark cloud storage containers and data objects with Data System Metadata to enforce service-level requirements for the data (see “SNIA Advances Cloud, Green Storage Standards”).

It will be interesting to see how the co-opetition plays out. Is a common management method for the cloud on the horizon? Or, are we doomed to proprietary clouds with proprietary data formats?

The future of storage is cloudy

October 9, 2009 -- Cloud computing and cloud storage are here to stay. The number of vendors with cloud offerings continues to multiply and I don't envy the end user trying to evaluate vendors and services.

Just this week we have seen a big push in the cloud storage market. IBM officially announced its cloud storage intentions with a declaration that it will enter the storage cloud space with the launch of the IBM Smart Business Storage solution, IBM Information Archive and new consulting services.

The IBM Smart Business Storage Cloud is a private cloud based on low-cost components with support for multiple petabytes of capacity, billions of files and scale-out performance. Big Blue's storage cloud is based on technologies including the IBM General Parallel File System have and storage and server technologies like XIV and BladeCenter.

Earlier in the week, Symantec released Veritas FileStore, a new clustered file system aimed at enterprise customers looking to build public or private storage clouds. FileStore is comprised of software-based appliances that run on commodity x86 server nodes and talk to clients using CIFS, FTP, HTTP or NFS. On the back-end, the FileStore nodes aggregate existing Fibre Channel and iSCSI SANs and JBODs as a shared storage pool. A FileStore system can scale up to 16 nodes and 2PB of total capacity.

Seagate also chimed in. Seagate's storage software arm, i365, announced a cloud storage-based replication service for medium-sized businesses as part of its push into the cloud storage space.

Terry Cunningham, i365's senior vice president and general manager, told me i365 is changing the way it approaches the cloud.

"Our offerings have been rip-and-replace in the past, and that is an unreasonable request for customers. Now we're agnostic and work with legacy backup packages," he said. "We can now get to the cloud without gutting the infrastructure."

All of these storage clouds are here or on the horizon and there are a few questions customers should be asking themselves as they try to pick a vendor. What types of metadata is required to ensure portability, compliance and security in the cloud? Can data be provided back to users in a format that can be ingested by a new service provider?

The storage industry is aware of some of the cloud confusion out there. It's a concern from both a perception and a technical standpoint.

"Cloud storage is not a fad like the one we may have witnessed with xSPs and storage service providers back in the year 2000 timeframe," says SNIA chairman Wayne Adams. "Cloud storage is here to stay and we need to develop common terminology and standards for building cloud infrastructures."

Stay tuned for more information about what the SNIA has in store for the cloud in our Cloud Storage topic center. The cloud news is sure to be fast and furious from next week's Storage Networking World conference.

SNW: Day two recap

Brocade is now shipping an FCoE switch and adapters to OEMs, Symantec has added DR testing software to its product line via a partnership and solid-state specialist Fusion-io just bagged close to $50 million funding.

Day two of Storage Networking World was uneventful from a news perspective, but we were able to track down some industry insiders and SNIA members to explain some of this week's announcements.

First up, a keynote from Symantec's new CEO, Enrique Salem, during which he said:

"Stop buying storage."

Not a surprising statement when you consider it came from a software company, but Salem says data reduction technologies and better management can defray the cost of additional hardware through better utilization.

"In many companies there are differences in storage hardware, and often islands of storage. One department might have plenty of free storage while another is adding arrays," Salem told a standing-room crowd this morning. "You need to identify and reclaim what you've bought but aren't using. Find that orphan storage, and bring it home. The hardware vendors will tell you they can show you how your existing storage is being used. Remember, their ultimate goal is to sell you more hardware."

Salem says storage resource management (SRM), thin provisioning, data de-duplication, and intelligent archiving can all bring those orphans home.

On the cloud storage front, I was able to sit down with Storage Networking Industry Association Chairman Emeritus and member of the Board of Directors Vincent Franceschini to discuss the Association's formation of a Technical Work Group (TWG) for cloud storage.

"It has become very clear that we need to clarify the definitions and terminology surrounding cloud storage," said Franceschini. "We believe we can help the market overall by delivering reference models to describe different solutions and cloud frameworks."

He also said industry collaboration is a must if cloud storage is going to be a viable option for enterprise storage in the future.

"We are going to be collaborating with other industry groups. There is no way it is going to work if [cloud platforms] are not integrated," he said.

The SNIA has also set up a Google group in an effort to maintain a "public face" on the Cloud Storage TWG's work.

SNW: Day one recap

April 06, 2009 -- The Storage Networking World (SNW) conference is under way and the InfoStor team is in Orlando to keep you up-to-date on news and announcements from the show.

A few product announcements trickled out of SNW this morning, including FalconStor Software’s release of the Backup Accelerator option for its Virtual Tape Library (VTL) product, 3PAR’s launch of a quad-controller storage array for midrange customers, the debut of cloud storage services startup Zetta, and the availability of Netgear’s newest NAS/unified storage system with a cloud storage option for SMBs.

Speaking of the cloud – and that’s all we seem to be speaking about lately – the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) today announced the creation of the Cloud Storage Technical Work Group (TWG) aimed at developing SNIA Architectures and best practices related to cloud storage technology. The initial TWG charter includes the focus to produce a set of specifications and to drive the consistency of interface standards across the various cloud storage related efforts.

The Cloud Storage TWG is also soliciting proposals for standard interfaces and is looking to engage vendors and other “Cloud industry parties” in its efforts. The group plans to release a reference model for Cloud Storage with associated terminology definitions to aid in further work on the standards. Cloud service and storage interface definitions are expected in draft form later this year and anticipated to be adopted starting in 2010.

The SNIA is also refocusing its efforts on the IP storage front. The Association announced an expansion in the charter of the SNIA IP Storage Forum, which is reflected in its new name – the SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum (ESF). The EFS has been tasked with driving the broad adoption of all Ethernet–connected storage networking solutions.

The ESF will consist of two Special Interest Groups - the iSCSI SIG and the NFS SIG. The iSCSI SIG will focus on continuing the IP Storage Forum agenda to evangelize the benefits and best practices related to iSCSI. Member companies include Compellent, Dell, HP, Intel, Microsoft, NEC, NetApp and Sun.

The new NFS SIG will be focused on NFS-based NAS solutions, particularly emerging technologies, such as pNFS. The founding members of the NFS SIG include EMC, NetApp, Panasas and Sun.

Additionally, the group also plans to form a Special Interest Group focused on the CIFS/SMB protocol and ecosystem.

Hifn made news with the launch of its BitWackr 250 and 255, which are aimed at server OEMs, Microsoft Partners and white-box server builders looking to add hardware-assisted data de-duplication and compression with thin provisioning to Windows Servers.

According to Hifn, BitWackr provides real-time, in-line de-dupe and compression, reducing the amount of data written to disk. The cards combine the company’s BitWackr block-based de-dupe software with a Hifn Express DR 250 PCI-x or 255 PCIe card that employs specialized hardware to perform data compression and de-dupe hashing operations.

The BitWackr 250 and 255 products are priced at $995 with general availability slated for the third quarter of this year.

InfoStor’s Editor-in-Chief, Dave Simpson, and I will be blogging/reporting from the conference all this week. Check out the Infostor homepage for the latest industry news & analysis from SNW Orlando. There is some news from Symantec on the horizon and Brocade has called a press conference for tomorrow afternoon. Stay tuned…