The big question of the day is whether the AWS announcement of a cloud storage gateway (one of the worst kept secrets in tech) will validate or kill the existing gateway market.  And that’s a good question.  For now it is a great validation that users are looking for a standards-based way to access the cloud for certain use cases.  And we do see storage services adoption ramping up.  In our 2012 spending intentions survey (coming soon, but I got a preview of the data that will be included), 51% of the respondents said they are using or plan to use Infrastructure as a Service (that is up from the 35% of respondents using or planning to use IaaS in last year’s survey).  Of the IaaS users, the biggest use case response is cloud storage (57%).

But an AWS new gateway won’t kill the independent gateway market near term – this beta version is really basic and does not have much in terms of bells and whistles – it is much less feature-rich than the initial implementations from the existing independent gateway vendors (CTERA, Nasuni, Panzura, Riverbed, StorSimple, Twinstrata, and I probably missed some), and those vendors have not stood still.  There is no deduplication (but there is compression) - depending on how compressible the data set is, without deduplication the AWS capacity and data transfer service charges could lead to some pretty big fees on the storage services side depending on the nature and use of the data.  Uploading data (data transfer IN) is free, but retrieving data (data transfer out) costs $$, so a restore of any size or frequent restores could add up.  This is a pure backup and DR play for now rather than a local cache for primary data in the cloud, but AWS is expected to expand functionality and use cases over time.

It is interesting to note that there is also no hardware node–not surprising, but interesting, and a possible challenge.  The AWS gateway runs in a VMware virtual machine and uses local disk capacity.  While some may consider this a good thing, experience has taught gateway providers like TwinStrata that sometimes you need to sell an appliance that can be dropped into the data center and dedicated to being the gateway – you often get better performance and have no worries about resource contention or workload management.  Plus – there is the mentality that storage buyers want to touch and feel something – pure cloud is still a tough sell in the enterprise.

And I hate to use the term “vendor lock in” because at some level everyone is locked into someone, but the independent gateway providers do provide users an option of transparently migrating data to a different service provider if their current provider does something like change the pricing model or SLA.  Just think about what happened when Iron Mountain decided to get out of the storage services business (not that I think this will happen at AWS, but pricing model tweaks are certainly a possibility).  Nasuni went out and proactively migrated their customers under the covers to their new service provider of choice.  By the time the IM news was public, Nasuni had done a ton of migration work.  While not an “apples-to-apples” comparison, it is illustrative of what is possible when using an independent.

The initial target use cases for AWS are dead on though - of the current cloud storage users we surveyed in our spending intentions research, the biggest use cases for them are backup (a whopping 67% are using cloud storage for backup), followed by DR (58%) and Archive (58%).  And that certainly reflects where some of the independent gateway vendors like Riverbed are finding a niche, so this will increase pressure on them.

Looking a little deeper – this is really a brilliant move by AWS, not because they have a gateway for cloud storage use, though.  It is because these snapshots are stored as Elastic Block Storage (EBS) snapshots.  This means they can be used to create EBS volumes and run against applications in EC2.  Test and dev operations can now be run against production snapshots in EC2.  And over time, users can just migrate applications into the cloud – after all, the data migration will already be done for them.  Once you do test and dev and get comfortable, the leaps to running tier 2 applications, then tier 1, become smaller – just ask VMware. At the end of the day I don’t think Amazon is really interested in being a gateway so some of your data can be stored in the cloud – I believe that they want all of your data, and compute, in the cloud.  And it may take years, but this is the gateway to that.

Nirvanix had some pretty impressive wins in 2011, and has done a good job getting its customers to go public.  It has been roughly a year since the new management took over, and their diversification strategy seems to be working.  Nirvanix sells both software and storage services.  Notable wins in 2011 include:

• Relativity Media–next gen studio behind hits like “Immortals” and “Limitless”; will leverage NVX public cloud for content collaboration to bring movies to completion faster.
• NBC Universal is deploying 2+ Petabytes (videos, photos, movies; leveraging Nirvanix public cloud for content archival and collaboration).
•  Advocate Healthcare has 500TB (healthcare content files; NVX public cloud).
• USC deployed 8.5 Petabytes (Videos, Photos; USC will also resell NVX Private Cloud as the USC Digital Repository).
• Cerner Healthcare for 2+ Petabytes (for PACs, radiology, clinical systems, patient records; Cerner will also resell NVX Private Cloud as Cerner Skybox Public Cloud).
• IBM is deploying a Multi-Petabyte Global Private Cloud; NVX is essentially building a replica of its Cloud Storage Network for IBM to sell as its own public cloud–IBM SmartCloud Enterprise.
• DRFortress is offering an onsite physical node federated with Nirvanix public cloud, providing its customers with a hybrid cloud storage deployment.

The first three are true public cloud users that are leveraging Nirvanix to accelerate business (because, as Steve D. mentioned in his blog last month, doing all the storage stuff yourself stinks, or something to that effect).  But the rest are resellers as well as users.  Now, this is a pretty impressive list – names we know and love.

I’ve actually talked to a few of the resellers and there seems to be strong momentum in the channel.  I don’t think it would be too risky to say that the strategy Nirvanix management laid out a year ago and has been executing against since is paying off for them.  Granted, Nirvanix adoption is only a microcosm in the larger cloud universe – but it is proving that the business model can work and there is money in IaaS.  Rumors of Nirvanix’s demise were swirling a mere 18 months ago, rumors which the new team seems to have silenced.

Looking forward to 2012, it would not be surprising to see Nirvanix gobbled up by a bigger player who can leverage the current cloud delivery network infrastructure, cloud software, and hybrid cloud model to offer both public and virtual private cloud services.  There are a lot of variables – a lot depends on the economy, and it is sure to be a shaky year because of the elections.  But Nirvanix is one I will be keeping an eye on.

I couldn’t be more excited to be speaking at the inaugural CITE event.  I am thankful to the conference panel for selecting me as a speaker.  Hope to see you there!

It is a really exciting time to be looking at this space.  I am a bit embarrassed (a trend in my blogs lately) to admit that I have 5 endpoint devices that I use for assorted tasks that are work related: an android phone, an android tablet, an iPad, a laptop, and a desktop.  Someday I will settle on which tablet I like better – but for now this is my reality.  The ability to access the latest, consistent version of my work documents from any of these devices is invaluable for me – all of our research data points are at my fingertips wherever I am.  All of my notes from all of my meetings – right there, no matter what device is in front of me.  Okay – I am probably atypical, but still – how many users have a smartphone and laptop?  Or a smartphone, laptop and tablet?  That is much more typical – and it is driving changes in IT storage strategies.

I was initially skeptical about enterprise adoption of these solutions – the most well known are well known because of consumer use, not business use.  However the “bring your own device” (BYOD) trend along with users having multiple endpoint devices is one driver for IT to look at solutions that support these devices, and of the companies we’ve spoken to that have BYOD policies, many (83% according to our research) allow employees to use their devices for both work and personal use.  That explains why perhaps the bigger driver is end-user demand – an awful lot of IT’s customers are deploying these solutions without waiting for permission, and IT is being pulled into looking at and endorsing a corporate-wide solution that will provide the manageability, security, and control they need to protect corporate information assets.

I’ve spoken to a number of companies that have adopted these solutions, from web-based businesses to some well known large companies known for a conservative approach to IT, and I am no longer skeptical.  They tell similar stories – the big drivers are end-user demand for these solutions, endpoint device support, unleashing the shackles of using a VPN for shared file access, collaboration, and supporting a mobile workforce.  And when I ask whether they are augmenting existing storage solutions or replacing, I consistently hear that they are replacing file servers – either Windows or LINUX-based or dedicated NAS systems.   Consumerization is indeed changing storage strategies within some enterprise IT shops and driving adoption of these solutions.

We will be increasing our coverage in this area in the coming year – this report is really to set the baseline for our future work.  It is only available to premium subscribers – but contact us if you are not a premium subscriber and interested.

First, he may be worth a gazillion dollars but he just comes across as a regular guy.  He is not surrounded by a posse of security guards, no handlers directing him to the “right” people to say hello to or policing his every word.  He really seems to be a man of the people, accessible and approachable, attending all the social gatherings.  At the conference he actually sat through all the keynotes and it seemed as if he considered everyone, from the speakers to the attendees, as his personal guests.

And just look at his accomplishments.  We all know the story–he built the company he started in a dorm room selling cheap storage capacity and built it into one of the largest PC companies in the world.  Over the past decade he’s diversified Dell’s offerings, mostly via acquisition, and built an extensive portfolio.  Dell has services (Perot), systems management (KACE), storage (EqualLogic and Compellent), networking (Force10), security (Secureworks) – and I am probably missing a few areas, Michael had quite an impressive acquisitions list slide in his keynote!  This all goes along with organically developed technology – an extensive server line.  Dell the PC company has become Dell the IT solutions company.

Interestingly enough, his humility seems to permeate the company. In fact, as my colleague Mark Peters astutely stated, other companies make lots of claims they can’t deliver against, while Dell delivers but doesn’t tell anyone. Every hero has a fatal flaw, and this could be his. Dell (the company) is poised on the brink. It was evident at the Dell World conference they are evolving to a solutions play–Dell talked it up, but telling an audience of a couple of thousand people doesn’t cut it. Neither does one-off press releases. Dell needs to look at its marketing investments and up the volume with sustained campaigns and beat their chests a bit. It is the same play they executed in the PC market, it just needs to be solutions-based.

And while Michael Dell has his detractors, he has really invested in giving back to those less fortunate.  He and his wife established the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation back in 1999, which focuses on “Transforming the lives of children living in urban poverty through better health and education.” Since then the foundation has committed more than $700 million to children’s causes in the US, India, and South Africa.  I was unaware of the foundation until I heard about it from Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce.com, in his Dell World keynote.  Marc talked about how inspired he is by Michael Dell’s charitable work and how much he aspires to emulate that.  Of course the Benioff talk only fueled my crush even more!

So if the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, take this as my first step, a public pronouncement.  I promise not to let my geek-crush color my research or influence my writings.  But I will take a moment to bask in the good fortune I have in being in a job that gives me an opportunity to meet industry luminaries from leading tech companies and feeding my geeky hero-worshiping high.

So, if Red Hat is going after a scalable storage back end to better support virtualized environments, Gluster is a good fit.  It is a scale-out software solution that supports pretty much any protocol and even multiple protocols per object or file.  It can run on commodity storage systems, providing software-based data protection and advanced functionality like local and remote replication and with clones and snaps on the way.

But I think there is more to this story. You can’t get away from the “big data” discussion. We define big data as “Data sets that exceed the boundaries and sizes of normal processing capabilities, forcing you to take a non-traditional approach.” Users bump up against these boundaries based on one or more of three key vectors (meaning users can hit multiple vectors with one application): amount of activity (file IO or IOPS), overall volume of data (massive scale), and/or file/object sizes (say a 10 TB Landmark Graphics file, to use an extreme example).

The classic analytics definition of big data, which in many cases is coming to mean Hadoop, forces these changes because it often bumps users against these boundaries. And while Gluster can scale to large overall volume and handle good size files, it is the Hadoop play that may be the pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. Hadoop has a critical flaw in that the Name Server (fancy name for a metadata server that keeps track of where all the data lives so it can be assembled properly) is a single point of failure. The name server goes away and you lose your entire instance of the data–it is useless.  But earlier this year, Gluster announced a solution that allows its file system to be used in place of HDFS, which brings all that software-based data protection and functionality to the Hadoop cluster and removes the single point of failure issue.

Now, Red Hat + Hadoop + Gluster = open source, no-lock in software functionality that runs on commodity hardware and enables users to hit some pretty decent price points that could unleash the real-time analytics potential of Hadoop.  Julie Lockner (whom I’ve been working closely with to build out our big data definitions and to bridge the storage/analytics discussion) has recently completed research that shows users are still mainly testing the big data analytics water with smaller data sets, but those in production are processing up to multiple terabytes of data at a time.  To process this amount of data in a conventional manner, without using Hadoop, the infrastructure costs can become quite prohibitive.  Now, with Hadoop-based solutions like what Red Hat could potentially unleash leveraging Gluster, that barrier is drastically lowered.  I would keep an eye on them in this space.

While I valued the opportunity to get to know some of the Box execs and was definitely impressed by the team, their drive, and their focus, I also got the opportunity to have some fascinating end-user discussions.  The users I spoke to are not necessarily web-based businesses, though some were, but most were well known larger enterprises, consumer brands, high tech, and media and entertainment companies.  So I got input from a pretty big swath that represented a good cross section of industries.

A couple of things struck me.

• First – some pretty big name companies are moving a lot of what they do into the cloud.  Not necessarily outsourcing infrastructure–more SaaS than IaaS.  This is consistent with our research, which found SaaS has an early mover advantage and lots of big companies across all industries are sticking at least a toe, if not a foot, into the water.
• Second thing was not that the predominant use case for Box is file consolidation and access improvements, it was why.  The IT people I spoke to really wanted a secure way to allow file access without users having to go through the VPN–that was a top benefit listed by pretty much everyone I spoke to.  So it was not a cost decision, it was a speed and ease of use decision.
• Speaking of cost, several users said that if they just looked at the storage costs, on-site storage using dense drives is more cost-effective than Box.   But it was still worth going to Box because of speed, agility, and ease of use–the tradeoffs were worth the extra cost.  Looking past pure raw storage costs and at maintenance and upgrade costs or, related to SharePoint when considering the upgrade, licensing and training costs, that shifted the cost equations into Box’s favor.
• Speaking of ease and agility–there is no need to forecast capacity and spend lengthy cycles on provisioning, so that was a big benefit that most brought up.
•  And last–I asked users what, if any, technology was being replaced by Box.  There was some SharePoint replacement, some calling out they were replacing the hard drives in laptops with iPads and the cloud, but the bulk of the users said they were replacing file servers and NAS, calling out LINUX and Windows File servers and EMC and NetApp NAS solutions.

One major user said 70% of all file data in its enterprise is now in Box.  Another plans to get there but is still a little concerned about scaling into multi-TB in the cloud so will proceed with caution.  Most of the users were pretty early on in their implementations but growing quickly.  It will be interesting to see how this space progresses.  I can see user home directories in non-regulated industries as a no-brainer here.  With some of the AD integration they’ve done, the ease and speed of provisioning (and de-provisioning) users I could see a huge sweet spot in the education space.  There are also a lot of potential vertically specific business enablement use cases.  It adds up to lots and lots of data going to the cloud via a SaaS model, rather than an IaaS model.

A quick thanks and kudos to Joely Urton, who runs AR at Box and did a great job ensuring we were well taken care of and got to spend quality time with the execs from the top down.  I have to admit to joining the legions of Aaron Levie fans. Aaron is the CEO and I think he’s still in his teens, or not far past them. He’s another silicon valley whiz kid that there will be a movie about in a few years.   He’s driven, passionate, and smart but not arrogant, with a strong vision.  I wanted to focus this blog on the user input but there is a ton of company news that came out this week, too, from raising a $50 million round with Salesforce as one of the investors to a partnership with HP to a boatload of integrations.  More on Box specifically later.

In fact, look for more coverage in this space soon, we’ve been very busy digging in deep!

I finally put pen to paper (showing my age – plus, somehow fingers to keyboard does not sound nearly as good) and published a market landscape report called Understanding the NAS Market.  I documented how we segment the NAS market by use cases, how it has evolved over time, what types of architectures fit which use cases, what vendors offer solutions where, and what the typical price points are for each segment.  It sounds like a mouthful because it is–at almost 20 pages, the report is on the long side but hopefully will provide some insight into why we’ve seen the rise of scale-out architectures in NAS and things users should consider when evaluating NAS systems!   At this time it is only available to subscription clients as a part of our premium service.

I am a cheapskate, too cheap to pay for a backup software license, and now I am paying the price in terms of lost family pictures, vacation memories captured in bits and bytes that I may never see again.  This is seriously upsetting–I take my three beautiful nieces on vacation in Maine every year, and we love looking at pictures from past trips and seeing how much they’ve grown and changed over the years.  Sadly, many of those pictures are now gone for good.

It isn’t that I did not have a backup strategy–I did, I am a storage industry analyst for god’s sake, I know better!  I went out and bought a 1TB hard drive last year, but rather than activating (and paying for) the backup software that came with it, I just dragged and dropped my files onto it.  I could swear that I got everything…but I really have a lousy directory structure and I missed a ton of files!  I knew about the poor directory structure going in and I checked and double-checked to make sure I found everything when I copied the files, I swear I did!  But when my system crashed and I looked at the backup copy I had made, it was readily apparent that there was stuff missing. Not only that, but I had no schedule for when I dragged and dropped, so my recovery point for the files I did copy is months (and months…..).

I can’t believe how much losing my home PC data has affected me–it really has me out of whack.  What hurts the most is that I DO know better!  Did I mention that I am a storage analyst in the tech industry!  Data protection and disaster  recovery is just a fact of life!

So, I have mended my cheapskate ways and now have a real backup strategy.  Yes, it is too little too late.  But I learned the hard way that it hurts being a cheapskate–the cost of this data loss is just too dear and too personal.

When we built the scale-out market forecast and suggested that in 2015 more than 80% of all systems shipped would be based on scale-out architectures, this is one of the reasons why.  Scale to massive capacity, do a refresh under the covers by adding new nodes to an existing system and rolling the old nodes out the door, consolidate assets, improve performance (both throughput and IO).  In fact–take a look at the benefits users reported from deploying scale-out systems and think about the implications–it is like buying a perpetual storage system that grows and evolves with your business!