Every cloud has a silver lining

Data storage firms are famously fond of talking about the exponential growth of data within organisations. While their existing and potential customers might tire of hearing about the ‘storage tsunami’ coming their way, for once the hyperbole is justified – there is a storage tsunami breaking over organisations right now. In fact, storage vendor EMC estimates that the average organisation is handling 60pc more information every year.

The response has been predictable: more and more storage capacity is being bought. According to market analyst IDC, the capacity of external disk storage being shipped in western Europe will rise from 0.5 exabytes (EB) in 2007 to more than 7EB in 2012 – a 14-fold increase in five years.

It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that efficient management of data is seen as one of the biggest headaches facing CIOs today. More data equals more storage capacity and more cost – both in terms of the storage boxes themselves and the people, facilities, power and technology needed to manage them.

The worsening storage dilemma has given new impetus to a concept that has been around for some years – utility or cloud computing. The idea is straightforward: rather than acquire and run your own storage infrastructure, you simply plug into a storage cloud managed by storage service providers running gigantic data centres – much in the same way as you plug into an electricity grid to get power.

An alternative form of this is the ‘private cloud’, which sits behind the corporate firewall and runs on a company’s own IT infrastructure. This is seen as more secure and manageable than a public cloud and, therefore, some commentators believe, more palatable to businesses in the short term than the fully outsourced public cloud.

Cloud computing is not pie in the sky; it’s already a sizeable and fast-growing business, and IDC reckons that such services will represent a US$42bn market by 2012.

Examples of cloud-based services include web-mail services such as Google Mail (Gmail), which offers several gigabytes (GB) of storage per user, and dedicated online storage services offering tens of GB of storage to consumers and small businesses for just a few euro a month.

Databackup.ie is one of the largest providers of such services in this country with over 2,500 customers nationwide, including Sherry Fitzgerald, the Probation Service and the National Youth Council.

Tom O’Connor, director of Databackup.ie, estimates that between 5–6pc of all Irish organisations now back up their data online.

“It is the way forward; it’s a far more secure, automated solution,” he remarks.

The falling cost of online backup is what has driven this market forward in recent years, and is causing more and more organisations to move away from traditional tape backup methods, O’Connor says.

“Small customers have, on average, 200GB of data. We charge a euro per GB [per month]. This makes it a realistic option for customers to move to online backup. Where before they may have been paying €600 a month for a company to come and take their tapes offsite, they can now back up online for about €100 a month, once the data is compressed. Especially in this climate, if you walked into a customer and told them you could save them €6,000 a year, they’d jump at that.”

Cost aside, the main drawback of traditional tape backup, O’Connor contends, is the scope for human error – people don’t always remember to back up every evening and, in many cases, wouldn’t know how to restore data from tape.

“I’d say 80pc of companies we speak to wouldn’t be able to restore a backup from tape. What’s more, there’s the whole security aspect – the majority of tape backups are not encrypted, and if someone is taking the tape offsite, you have the scenario of accounts information and key customer data leaving your building in an unsecured manner.”

That said, online backup it not completely ‘online’. Owing to the large data volumes and the relatively slow internet connections used by most businesses, the first backup is usually done manually. In other words, an engineer will call to a customer’s premises, take a copy of its data and upload that to a storage pool in the data centre of the storage provider.

Thereafter, backups are done online because only the incremental changes need to be uploaded, rather than the entire data set. Similarly, when a data restoration is required, it is much quicker to achieve this via a direct download from tape/disk rather than online.

If this would seem to be a millstone around the necks of online backup providers, it can, in fact, work in their favour because it acts as a barrier to entry to the likes of global operators such as Amazon and Microsoft, which have well-publicised plans to start offering consumer and business services via the cloud.

“If companies are using cloud computing, the services need to be local. International clouds are not the way forward; they need to have the information local – where it is needed,” argues O’Connor. “In our case, we have a fleet of engineers on the road. We also have 300 channel partners who can get to customers in a hurry.”

Karl Jordan, country manager for enterprise storage at Hewlett-Packard (HP) Ireland, also sees a growing interest in cloud computing, as organisations and service providers explore the possibilities.

“At the moment, the cloud is a small but growing source of services for IT departments into the business. Organisations are looking to see how effectively the cloud can deliver services for them, and the people running the cloud are asking themselves what they can do to make cloud-based applications viable for organisations. Reliability, performance, flexibility, agility, cost effectiveness and scalability – these are all part of the answer. And there are a lot of new storage technologies that can support such requirements.”

Innovation is the driver
While cloud computing is still in its infancy in Ireland, the fact it is happening at all is down to a series of technological innovations, particularly virtualisation, says Jordan.

“Storage-as-a-service is enabled by advanced virtualisation technologies, such as heterogeneous storage resource aggregation (the ability to virtualise many individual, heterogeneous storage arrays into a common pool of managed storage); array partitioning (to facilitate the separation of storage pools and to guarantee quality of service); thin-provisioning (to eliminate over-provisioning and facilitate just-in-time presentation of capacity in response to demand); and storage-usage metering (to allow billing based on storage usage). All these features enable storage-as-a-service and support the delivery of cloud computing, as well as traditional in-house or hosted services,” notes Jordan.

Tony Quinn, commercial sales manager at EMC Ireland, agrees. “Virtualisation is changing the way people access information, how they manage it and how they protect and share that information.”

One of the benefits, he says, is that information can now be given a priority ranking, which can change over time. When information is current, it can be stored on fast, high-performance storage drives, and, as it ages, it can be automatically moved to lower-cost systems – ultimately an archive – where speed of access is less of a priority.

“Virtualisation has brought information life-cycle management to life – putting information in a place that matches its relative cost to the business. And there’s a lot of work going on in the marketplace on this right now,” he says.

His colleague, John O’Callaghan, director of EMC’s Executive Briefing Centre for EMEA at Ovens, Co Cork, where the latest technologies are showcased to EMC customers, believes a number of corporate IT applications can be transferred to the cloud, but that it will be a gradual process.

“I think we’ll see an evolution of the consumer online backup services moving into enterprises very soon. After that will come business continuity and disaster recovery services and, in the longer term, maybe people will trust the cloud to manage their applications and store their applications data – enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and so on. But that’s in the longer term.”

Jordan shares the view that, especially where large, high-throughput, transaction-type systems such as ERP are concerned, the cloud, as it currently looks, is limited.

“Enterprise-class, transaction-process environments which demand very high performance levels just aren’t suitable for the cloud. The cloud can deliver the capacity but not, as yet, the necessary performance.” While internet speed is probably good enough for email and perhaps office productivity software, it is simply not quick enough for high-end transaction systems, he contends.

This does not mean cloud computing is a failure, Jordan points out, but simply that it is just another way for an IT department to deliver storage services to the business.

Storage, he concludes, is a case of “horses for courses”, and organisations will adopt a blend of delivery models in order to get the right balance between performance and cost.

“You will always have in-house hosted applications that are delivered by a storage area network (SAN) providing very fast local speeds to users; you’ll have some hosted applications that will sit outside the organisation and are connected via direct links usually; and you’ll have a minority of applications that are cloud-suitable.”

But ongoing technological improvements will make the cloud increasingly relevant, he agrees.

“Adoption of cloud computing is low among Irish companies as the number of cloud-ready applications is currently restricted. However, expect to see increased availability and adoption of cloud-based applications as technology enables the agile infrastructure utility, and application providers take advantage of these to deliver cloud-optimised applications.”

Taking care of business
Cloud computing has been made possible by technologies such as virtualisation, but these present new security and data-management challenges. So contends Ciaran Farrell, business development manager at Kroll Ontrack Ireland, a data-recovery and data-management company.

“The take-up of virtualisation has been massive in recent times, and it does bring benefits in terms of cost savings, server consolidation and green computing, but new technologies bring new risks as well. In the past 12 months, we’ve seen a 10-fold increase in the number of data-recovery requests from people who have lost data in virtualised environments.

“Virtualisation adds an extra layer of complexity to people’s infrastructure, so sometimes, when data loss occurs, it can be very difficult to pinpoint where this has happened. And that’s something people need to be aware of,” says Farrell.

As PC and laptop hard drives get bigger, the amount of data being stored locally increases. This presents additional data-security challenges for organisations, he argues.

“More people are storing more data, and it’s important that people take responsibility for the security of that data, particularly those who are holding data that’s relevant to other people or organisations.

He continues: “People don’t realise that if data is not deleted in a secure fashion from the storage media, be it a tape or a laptop hard drive, it can still be recovered. So, if you’re transferring your data to an online backup environment, you need to make sure your old tapes are securely disposed of. Deleting files doesn’t mean they’re gone forever – it only removes the pointers to that information. If the wrong type of people get their hands on the data, they will be able to restore it, causing potentially massive embarrassment and financial loss to your company.”

Farrell believes organisations need to be aware of the risks and have effective recovery plans in place should the worst happen. He also notes that the use of online backup services should not make organisations complacent about data management.

“You can’t ignore data that might still be held locally, or data that’s held on laptops which are moving around and might be outside the backup window. You still need to be vigilant. In addition, there are challenges associated with organisations moving away from legacy backup systems, such as tape backup.

“Our advice to companies is: get organised, be proactive and make sure you’re retaining the data you do need and culling useless data so you’re not taking all that dead data with you,” he concludes.

By Brian Skelly