storagesummit

premiseS ;)

Is cloud storage a simpler and cheaper solution to on-premise offerings?

Many customers I talk to concerned about sensitive data living outside of their direct sphere of control. Not worth the risk.

-> Or managing Hybrid where workloads / data may migrate back and forth based on changing project criteria

Got to watch out for hidden costs with cloud archiving. Prices may change/escalate over time, switching costs may be prohibitive, downtime costs (outages do happen, maybe more often in public clouds than on-prem solutions),

@KerstinWoods not worth the risk - for everyone - is the right note her to make. for most environments off-site, public/shared cloud archiving is a good economic decision

Security, security, security!

@KerstinWoods however! you are always responsible yourself even if the provider messes up. therefor multiple platforms should be used

Usually the gotcha is in the retrieval costs. Free to ingest, but watch out when you need your data back.

all point about cost are valid, until you compare those costs to the cost of an extra datacenter location

Agreed. If you need to build a new data center all bets are off.

Customers like T3 Media use tape in a cloud model for cost-effectiveness: http://link.brightco...

@Chris_IIg -> In your opinion, how far are they on the security journey 5% 20% 50%?

but on-topic referring to tiering: I like the idea of (public) cloud storage as a tier. Look at StoreSimple, Avere, ...

Yes, including public cloud as a tier is the right direction, but still need to address security concerns, which of cours, never be completely satisfied. So which data goes to cloud tier is important consideration

@cmosoares Shifting from disk to flash can cut footprint, power and cooling and with the drop in flash prices could be a much less expensive option than building a new data center.

Is it a sustainable business model? Can anyone beyond Amazon survive?

@cmosoares yes! Amazon is just one of the business models that works.

Other vendors have flamed out -- Norvanix for one. Others been acquired.

@cmosoares I didn't say everyone will survive - I said Amazon will not be the only one

@cmosoares It's a good point - you need to be careful to whom you entrust your data.

WIll Box, Dropbox make it despite enormous cash infusions

-> Sure they'd argue its just another variant of outsourcing non-core to foucs on competitive differential? (not data center management) . ADP on steroids.
Strategy vs successful execution, two very different things.

Won't security always be a journey, not a destination?

Depends on applications and use cases in effect. Could be perf. disk and capacity optimized disk in a single subsytem or could be independent hardware tiers, i.e. flash, spinning disk, tape

Managed by an HSM or archive manager software

The latter, that is

I think it's about aligning data to the best storage so that you optimize performance, capacity and cost simultaneously

he who still needs to explain tiered-storage should not be in a storage discussion :)

Can you please define HSM?

Tiering started with different speeds of disks - has flash made a dramatic change in how the technology is used?

Also, we should discuss issues such as long term data retention for compliance, archiving or BI/BA purposes. as well as how to manage tiered storage.

Not in a long term retention, i.e. archiving environment. Flash has less value here.

i think of tiered storage as aligning different capabilities to different sets of data to optimize cost.

@KerstinWoods -> tough to optimize all three legs of that stool.

But a great HSM with robust policies might do the trick

The key here is that not all data is equal yet so often we end up treating it all the same - putting it all on the same storage systems - such a waste!

@JeffFrick But that's the beauty of tiered storage :)

-> Does the media demand bifurcate? Flash (speed) and Tape (cost). Not much left for spinning disc in the middle

there are 2 types of storage tiering: the first one is multiple capabilities in a single platform/system. This could be that 1 file/volume resides on one of the tiers 1/2

How about matching the economic value of data to storage device? High-value, high access demand to fast spinning disk or flash, lower value to SATA; dormant to tape?

@KerstinWoods -> like designing an airplane, constant tradeoffs until you get an optimal solution for the objective at hand.

the second type is where a single file/volume is automatically distributed over different storage types

HSM = Heirarchical Storage Management. Been around for a long time. Also, sometimes referred to as ILM. But there are probably some distinctions between HSM and ILM that not everyone is aware of or agrees to

i see flash generally used to avoid tiering.

but tiering as such has nothing to to with archiving. maybe about retention but not archiving.

Let's say about the storage infrastructure behind archiving

Flash instead of tiering - Wow - that's an awfully expensive solution for a lot of inactive data.

no, archiving as such is the act of removing data from a production location

Archiving includes search, content awareness, compliance and deletion/scrape policies

tiered storage does not necessarily define or help with any of the above

Yes, removing from production environment, but still may be the primary copy of the data

if you are removing data from production and it's the only copy, you got to fire your data architects :)

In other words, its not necessarily data protection, though archiving may include BC/DR capabilities to support the archive

A good archive manager will manage multiple copies of the file across multiple tiers of storage.

Automatically based on established policies, of course.

This actually can reduce dramatically both production storage requirements and data protection (secondary storage) requirements. A lot of people don't recognize these added benefits of archiving less active data from production

"Performance Disk" is becoming an oxymoron - if it spins it's slow