Whenever something catastrophic happens, there is always the risk for knee jerk reactions. Considerations for Cloud Storage tend to fall into this situation. There are those companies who would lead you to believe that physical disk drives and file servers are a thing of the past. Simply install their little widget and voilà! All of your data will be magically protected.

The only problem with this is reality. With the average internet upload speed in America of 384Kb/s, backing up just 50GB of data could take up to a week. And what happens if you do have to restore a complete system? Are you simply going to download all of your information once you’ve restored your failed computer? When did you want to get back to work?

And let’s not forget the new crop of storage companies, comprised of non-storage people. Just because they’ve come up with some novel marketing scheme doesn’t mean they’re equipped to protect your data. For example, would you consider buying 24TB of storage from a company if their product couldn’t protect more than 16TB worth of files? Well, that’s probably what’s going to happen if you don’t do your homework. It’s no mystery that most free or low cost services are based on some distribution of the Linux operating system. And the most popular file system used by these distributions is ext3. Now, for most purposes this is a fantastic file system choice. But it’s not the best choice for building out large scale storage. Ext3 can store 2³¹-1 blocks. At 8K, that means a total of less than 16TB of data can be protected. If the block size is smaller, such as 4K, then half that amount of data can be stored, regardless of how much physical storage might be present. And for those thinking of migrating to ext4, this article might change your mind.

Of course, this is a bit technical for most people to consider. The idea behind Cloud Storage is that it’s cheap and “grow as you go”. But there are other ways of addressing these concerns. Let’s a take a brief look at how unified storage has evolved over the years.

Convergence of file-sharing protocols

Back in the early nineties, the whole introduction and concept of Network Attached Storage (NAS) was to converge multiple networked file systems into a single appliance. The alternative was to deploy costly Unix, Windows and Netware servers for this purpose. And as expensive as these early storage products were, they were significantly less expensive than dedicated servers.

Over time, the use of Linux and open source made it possible to dramatically lower the costs for such solutions. They improved in capacity, performance and ease of use as well. Eventually, NAS became a mainstay in IT. It made collaboration of information ultra easy. However, there was still a need for improved application support.

Convergence of block and file

Applications, especially database dependent ones, tend to prefer block storage. This is because their indexing capabilities require them to have more support over the underlying file system. And network file systems such as CIFS and NFS typically get in the way of this. As a result, IT personnel would deploy Direct Attached Storage (DAS) to these application servers. But this had scalability and cost issues.

While Storage Area Networks (SANs) could help leverage the costs of block storage across several application servers, they required separate planning and purchasing decisions over those required for user storage. This bifurcation of storage paradigms actually led to higher management costs.

In 2003, Network Appliance and Snap Appliance pushed an evolution in Unified Storage by converging block and file support within a single storage appliance. This combination meant that many IT departments could simply buy a storage solution for both applications and users.

The next wave

Contrary to the thoughts of some, the next evolution in Unified Storage does not consist of tossing out physical hardware and replacing it with an application. There are different aspects of storage that must be satisfied for IT and for most users as well.

1. Primary storage
2. Secondary storage
3. Backup storage
4. Off-site storage

Because of the latencies, unreliability of service, and even security issues with storing information online, Cloud Storage is nowhere close to being ready for use in several of these roles, especially as primary storage.

Instead, there has to be further consolidation on the local area network. Secondary storage and backup typically get confused because a redundant copy of data is created and maintained. But backup is very specific in its function. It is intended to offload the responsibility of making an extra copy from the creator of the information. In recent years, backup software has grossly outpaced storage in sheer costs. And as a result, many small businesses avoid using such software– choosing instead to rigorously copy data to their file servers when they remember to do so or when they feel they’ve copied a sufficiently important enough piece of data. But there’s a better way.

At Cachengo, we thought taking away another purchase consideration would be the better route. Rather than turning every feature into a separate product to purchase, we added some of the best backup capabilities in the industry– at no additional charge.

Now, we can fully address all aspects of the data protection roles in a single product, which is an industry first. If you are looking for a bridge between your current storage and Cloud storage, look no further. Request a demonstration today!