Storage managed service providers

New DR SaaS startup buddies up with Data Domain, offers SLA

A new private-cloud SaaS player launched this week, with plans to combine VMware and Data Domain products into an off-site disaster recovery service with a money-back recovery time service level guarantee.

Simply Continuous, based in San Francisco, is offering two services: Data Recovery Vault and AppAlive. Both involve the use of Data Domain’s DD series appliances at the customer site, which replicate to Data Domain appliances at the Simply Continuous data center. AppAlive adds bare-metal restore of servers from virtual hot standbys stored by Simply Continuous, which can also perform the conversion of physical servers to virtual ones using VMware’s vConverter tool.

Founder and CEO Tom Frangione said Simply Continuous will charge for capacity according to actual physical data stored, rather than by ‘virtual’ data - so if a user’s 20 TB are compressed to 1 TB by Data Domain’s dedupe algorithm, Simply Continous will charge the user for 1 TB.

Both services also come with a recovery time SLA, based on the type and amount of data stored. The SLAs first guarantee that data will be recoverable on demand, and then set a maximum recovery window for data. According to a copy of the SLA provided to Storage Soup, the consequences for Simply Continuous are as follows:

• If Data Recovery Vault is not available at our expected 99.9% rate in any calendar month, we will give [the customer] a credit toward the next month’s service.
• If that happens three times in any 12 month period, [the customer] can terminate the contract.
• If [the customer] cannot recover data in the agreed upon time frame, we’ll give [the customer] 3 months service credit toward future services

Customers can also monitor their own storage capacity at Simply Continous with tools the service provider makes available through its web portal, including SNMP trap reports and a Salesforce.com-based help-ticketing system. The company is targeting users with between 1 and 100 TB of data. Pricing depends on capacity. Frangione said the company, which received $10 million in a recent series A funding round, has signed up about 20 customers since last November.

The launch of this company comes after some discussion this spring about the use of service providers for the backup and offsite DR storage of business data, after a well-publicized lawsuit between backup service provider Carbonite and its former storage provider. Enterprise Strategy Group founder Steve Duplessie urged enterprise users to seek out service provider offerings that included service-level agreements. Backup SaaS provider SpiderOak said SLAs will be soon be available, though both SpiderOak reps and Carbonite CEO David Friend have pointed out that offering SLAs, especially SLAs that include geographic redundancy, raises the cost of the service for customers. Either way, both say SLAs, when and if they are added, will not be added to public-cloud consumer-oriented services, but to separate business or enterprise offerings.

GlassHouse Technologies looks to support cloud storage

Mark Shirman, CEO of consulting and managed services firm GlassHouse Technologies Inc., says his company is looking to incorporate cloud storage into its architectural and IT management offerings. New offerings haven’t been formally rolled out yet, the CEO told me last Friday, but the firm already sees cloud computing taking hold among enough of its customers to be preparing to embrace it.

One thing GlassHouse won’t do, Shirman said, is hang out its own shingle as a cloud storage provider. “There are plenty of folks out there who do it - we’re looking to support our users’ infrastructures in the cloud,” he said. GlassHouse already has several remote monitoring tools at its disposal for administering customer environments. In the coming weeks, it will be “settling on a few favorites” among cloud storage providers to begin integrating its services with. However, Shirman said, “we’re not going to be trying to pick who’s going to win.”

But Shirman didn’t shy away from placing a bet on the cloud’s long-term future. “Because I drink so much of my own Kool-Aid, I can see companies morphing skills so that they’re running as service providers - our business is kind of predicated on that,” he said. But it will take quite a while for any kind of overwhelming trend to take shape, and it will begin with lower-tier, lower-priority data. “The enterprise level will see this happen a lot faster than the consumer,” he said.

My own jury is still out on this. I can envision IT becoming a utility, managed from centers of expertise the way utilities are now - most of us no longer shovel coal into our fireplaces, for example - electric companies burn massive amounts of coal at centralized plants and pipe the energy to our homes. A similar thing could be on the way for IT, substituting “data” for “energy.” That would seem to also mean, then, that the expertise that lives inside enterprises currently would migrate and consolidate at these service-provider data centers–so an IT pro would become more like a plumber or HVAC technician, someone from a third-party specialist company who arrives on-site for occasional breakfix problems.

Similarly, though Shirman saw this as more of a long shot, I can see a Geek Squad technician becoming the 21st century’s answer to the plumber or home electrician, and the home network becoming more analogous to the plumbing in a residential home - not something the resident usually sees or manually manages. This is also the vision described to me by Rackspace’s general manager for cloud storage last week.

However, I’ve been around the storage and IT industry long enough to see a few “next big things” come and go, and I’m sure they are far from the last. Given the conservatism of the enterprise storage market, the way storage administrators prize their own deep knowledge and expertise on their systems, and the sensitivity of corporate data, it also seems reasonable to see the cloud becoming one more tool added to an otherwise traditional enterprise IT toolbox.

Any thoughts from the peanut gallery?

Behind the scenes at Carbonite’s online backup service

Carbonite CEO David Friend in his Boston-area office

“Do-it-yourself” infrastructure is a competitive differentiator among providers of storage services, I’ve learned in conversations with providers over the last two weeks. While not every Web 2.0 service is storage-focused, these discussions make me wonder what the results will be for third-party storage vendors looking to supply prepackaged configurations to service-provider data centers.

Following Carbonite’s lawsuit against its former storage supplier, its competitors such as SpiderOak have pounced on the opportunity to tout their own internal infrastructures in an attempt to lure worried Carbonite customers.

SpiderOak CEO Ethan Oberman told me that SpiderOak assembles its own storage systems out of commodity servers and disk drives, purchasing individual components and assembling them under the company’s proprietary storage clustering software. “We don’t rely on a third party pre-assembled storage system” as Carbonite did with Promise, Oberman said.

Shortly after I posted about Oberman’s statements, Carbonite CEO David Friend invited me to see Carbonite’s infrastructure. I took him up on that last Friday, and it turns out Carbonite’s setup isn’t much different from what SpiderOak described.

The current Carbonite infrastructure - sets of 15 one-terabyte
SATA drives packed into racks of custom Dell equipment

Carbonite has between 10 PB and 12 PB of storage in two data centers in the Boston area. While the vendor is suing Promise for products it deployed several years ago, Carbonite has already completely changed out the Promise storage in favor of a self-integrated system of Dell PowerEdge MD1000 and MD3000 servers packed with 15 one-terabyte SATA disks, configured for RAID 6. Four of these units are attached to each server node that runs the company’s internally written parallel file system.

Carbonite infrastructure detail

SpiderOak’s Oberman said his company assembles the disk drives and RAID controllers internally. Friend said he’s still content to let a third-party vendor assemble the RAID arrays despite the experience with Promise.

“The software is what we worry about,” he said. Promise’s arrays had firmware bugs, he said, something that might not have changed if Carbonite had done more of the hardware assembly. “Even if you buy a disk drive from somewhere, it has firmware in it - we’re not going to get into that kind of stuff,” Friend said.

Carbonite chose Dell to replace Promise based on a discounted price and its willingness to work with Carbonite to design a customized hardware system, according to Friend.

The more I talk to online storage service providers, the more there seems to be a disconnect between what they’re deploying and what storage vendors are marketing in an effort to reach Web 2.0 shops. While new “cloud” storage systems such as EMC’s Atmos and HP’s ExDS are built on industry-standard hardware components, the vendors also supply software to tie those components together.

Friend said he’s learned that a fully prepackged software-hardware system from a third-party vendor won’t fit his business. “Every piece of software we’ve bought along the way has broken,” he said.

But this also may be because Carbonite is an outlier in terms of its workload. “There aren’t a lot of 10 petabyte data centers out there,” Friend said. He estimated some 95% of the processing time in Carbonite’s data center is spent on write, rather than read operations. “There [also] aren’t a lot of data centers out there that are ‘mostly write,’” he added.

Carbonite also designed its parallelized distributed file system to treat data in its data center and on users’ PCs as part of one big geographically distributed pool. Friend claims this is a differentiator, providing speedier restores to users than competitors such as Mozy can do by reassmbling files before restoring data.

For those reasons, Friend said he doesn’t anticipate that online services focused primarily on storing customer data will be fertile ground for existing storage vendors. This hasn’t stopped third-party storage vendors from making regular sales calls to Carbonite’s data center, according to senior director of operations Kai Gray. Gray said he listens to most of the pitches, but he echoed Friend on the issues with prepackaged software, and said the cost comparison equation has yet to change.

“By the time [a storage vendor] puts stuff together and marks it up, it’s too expensive,” he said. Storage product competition in this data center is at the disk-drive level rather than systems. “We’re eagerly awaiting two terabyte disk drive shipments,” Gray said. Right now Carbonite has mostly Western Digital disk drives deployed, but “we are very drive agnostic.”

While Carbonite has yet to go for a third-party “cloud” storage system, Friend also points out it’s a different animal from many other Web 2.0 companies. “Most data centers are a cost center, not the business itself,” he said. “This is our factory - everything has to be customized because it’s a competitive advantage. It’s worth it to spend money designing our own file system, but if you’re, say, Fidelity, you don’t want to do that.”

Carbonite CEO David Friend and director of operations Kai Gray in one of Carbonite’s Boston-area data centers

Digital archiving the next frontier?

The data center I saw was very impressive - it’s in one of the newest facilities in the Boston area, complete with ultrasonic humidifiers and state-of-the-art security . But it’s not too far from Carbonite’s other data center, bringing to mind what ESG founder and blogger Steve Duplessie wrote after Carbonite announced the Promise lawsuit. The analyst cautioned that enterprise users should ask vendors about things like SLAs and geographic redundancy to distinguish between consumer/prosumer and enterprise services before signing over their backups.

I asked Friend about this. Carbonite sees itself as a consumer/prosumer offering, he said, and does not offer SLAs or redundancy outside the Boston area. “Because we’re offering a backup service, there’s already geographic redundancy between the user’s PC and our data center,” he said. “No one [in our market] seems to want to pay double for a backup of a backup.”

However, “if we get into archiving, where we might have the only copy of a document, geographic redundancy would come into play,” he said. Is Carbonite planning that move? “We’re thinking about it,” he said. “It would be a logical product line extension.”

Nirvanix lands on The Planet

The Planet, which hosts servers and applications for its customers, is adding a cloud-based storage service to its offerings based on a new partnership with cloud storage provider Nirvanix. Nirvanix came out of stealth last fall, claiming it could offer better performance than established cloud players like Amazon S3. The reason was because it is constructing a global network of storage “nodes” based on the way Web content delivery systems work: by moving the storage and processing power closer to the user, cutting down on network latency.

With this agreement, The Planet is making one of its Texas data centers a new Nirvanix node, bringing the storage cloud to its existing hosting customers. The Planet will also be opening up the new infrastructure to non-hosted, storage-only customers in 1Q 2009, according to Rob Walters, general manager of the storage and data protection business unit at The Planet.

The Planet will join an already crowded cloud storage market which includes big players like EMC and Amazon. According to Walters, one differentiator between The Planet’s and Amazon’s cloud offerings is that the Planet will not charge for “requests” to the cloud file system in addition to capacity and bandwidth charges, which Amazon does for some of its services. “Stripping it down to bandwidth and capacity is a big piece of our value-add,” he said.

IDC: Unstructured data will become the primary task for storage

According to a new IDC Enterprise Disk Storage Consumption Model report released this week, transaction-intensive applications are giving way as the main segment of enterprise data to an expanded range of apps as well as a tendency to create more copies of data and records for business analytics including data mining and e-Discovery.

The report estimates that unstructured data in traditional data centers will eclipse the growth of transaction-based data that until recently has been the bulk of enterprise data processing. While transactional data is still projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 21.8%, it’s far outpaced by a 61.7% CAGR predicted for unstructured data in traditional data centers.

“In the very near future, the management and organization of file-based information will become the primary task for many storage administrators in corporate datacenters,” the report reads. “And this shift will have a significant impact on how companies assess storage solutions in terms of systems’ performance, operational efficiency, and file services intelligence.”

The IDC report also builds on research first highlighted in an IDC blog last week concerning the cloud. According to the report, the sharpest growth in storage capacity will come from new organizations described as “content depots.” IDC estimates storage consumption from these organizations will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 91.8% through 2012. Examples of content depots  include the usual cloud suspects: Google, Amazon, Flickr, and YouTube.

These content depots have different IT requirements and infrastructures than traditional enterprise data centers. We’re seeing examples of these new  infrastructures pop up in the market, including systems with logical abstraction between the hardware and software elements; the use of commodity servers as a hardware basis for storage platforms; and the use of clustered file systems.

Some in the industry have compared this “serverization” of storage to the transition between proprietary workstations and PCs in the 1980’s. But IDC analyst Rick Villars says this isn’t a zero-sum game. “This isn’t going to replace traditional IT,” he said. “Ninety-five percent of what people are developing and building in the storage industry today is irrelevant to what the cloud is building. You could take that as a negative, but it also translates into opportunity. These are new market spaces and new storage consumers that weren’t around five years ago.”

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the role the cloud will play as the global economy softens. There is a difference of opinion between those who see a capital-strapped storage market as an even more conservative and risk-averse one and those who argue the opportunity to avoid capital expenditures will nudge traditional IT applications into the cloud. Still others point out the hurdles to cloud computing that remain, including network scalability and bandwidth constraints.

For example, when it comes to storage applications such as archiving, analyst reports from Forrester Research this year cited  latency in accessing off-site archived messages and searching them for e-discovery as major barriers to adoption for archiving software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.

Cloud computing “definitely exposes weaknesses in networking,” Villars said, but “the closest point to the end user is the cloud, if you want to distribute content to end users spread around the world.”

Other challenges include the growing pains major cloud infrastructures such as Amazon’s S3 have experienced over the last 18 months, and the potential risk of putting more enterprise data eggs in one service provider’s cloud data center basket. Villars points out, “I doubt Amazon has had more problems than a typical large enteprise, and they offer backup with geographic distribution for free.”

However, geographic distribution brings with it its own challenges, such as varying regulations among different countries. “There are regulatory problems with Europe,” Villars said. “Laws there say that if you have data on a European customer, yhou can’t move it out of Europe. If you want your cloud provider to spread copies between the U.S., Asia and Europe for global redundancy, that becomes an issue.”

Will recession drive businesses to the cloud?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve written a couple of stories about how the current global economic crisis is being projected to impact the storage market. While users say they don’t anticipate much of a change in their daily life–storage budgets are lean and adoption of products in the storage market is conservative as it is–financial analysts and storage experts see a much bigger impact for storage vendors from the collective effects of declining storage spending growth.

However, there’s one area where, if you’ll pardon the phrase, a potential silver lining has been spotted: cloud computing. One theory is that less available capital or credit for capital outlay makes the economies of scale and zero-hardware options offered by cloud vendors more attractive. But another theory is that in the current economic climate, users become more risk averse than ever, and the cloud remains a new, relatively bleeding-edge phenomenon.

Today there have been some more analyses released about the possibilities for the cloud market, one a cloud computing spending forecast from IDC and the other is an analysis of the barriers to cloud entry by Gregory Ness for Seeking Alpha.

With or without economic downturns, according to Ness, the nature of today’s network infrastructure is a hurdle to widespread cloud deployment (not to mention the bandwidth of the average data center’s connection to the wider Internet):

Certainly there will always be a business case for elements of cloud, from Google’s pre-enterprise applications to Amazon’s popular services and the powerhouse of CRM, HR and other popular cloud services.  Yet there are substantial economic barriers to entry based on the nature of today’s static infrastructure.[...]Until the current network evolves into a more dynamic infrastructure, all bets are off on the payoffs of pretty much every major IT initiative on the horizon today, including cost-cutting measures that would be employed in order to shrink operating costs without shrinking the network.

Automation and control has been both a key driver and a barrier for the adoption of new technology as well as an enterprise’s ability to monetize past investments.  Increasingly complex networks are requiring escalating rates of manual intervention.  This dynamic will have more impact on IT spending over the next five years than the global recession, because automation is often the best answer to the productivity and expense challenge.

IDC acknowledges that the growth opportunity is “in its infancy” but says the marginal growth will be irresistible to vendors:

Of the $383 billion customers will spend this year within the five major IT segments noted above, $16.2 billion - or a mere 4% - will be consumed as cloud services.  By 2012, customer spending on IT cloud services will grow almost threefold, to $42 billion.By 2012 - based on a conservative forecasting approach…customer spending on IT cloud services will grow almost threefold, to $42 billion, accounting for 9% of customer spending.

On one level, one could argue that - in spite of the all the buzz about Cloud Computing and Cloud Services - this model will not even crack 10% of IT spending four years from now. And therefore, one could reasonably ask: why all the fuss?On one level, one could argue that - in spite of the all the buzz about Cloud Computing and Cloud Services - this model will not even crack 10% of IT spending four years from now. And therefore, one could reasonably ask: why all the fuss?

One reason IT suppliers are sharpening their focus on the “cloud” model is its growth trajectory, which - at 27% CAGR - is over five times the growth rate of the traditional, on-premise IT delivery/consumption model.  Spending on IT cloud services is growing at over five times the rate of traditional, on-premise IT.As noted in our recent user survey, this rapid growth is being driven by the ease and speed with which users can adopt these offerings, as well as the cloud model’s economic benefits (for users and suppliers alike) - which will have even greater resonance in the current economic crisis.

Even more striking than this high growth rate, is the contribution cloud offerings’ growth will soon make to the IT market’s overall growth.  By 2012 - even at only 9% of user spending - cloud services growth will account for fully 25% of the industry’s year-over-year growth in these five major segments.  In 2013, if the same growth trajectories continue, IT cloud services growth will generate about one-third of the industry’s net new growth in these segments.

It will be interesting to see how things actually play out.

EMC rolls out MozyPro for Mac

EMC’s Mozy online backup has added a new Mac edition of MozyPro to its product line. This news follows the introduction of Mozy’s first Home edition Mac client in May.

The MozyPro for Mac product, which will be available immediately, adds centralized management features for Mac servers and workstations, including the creation of groups of clients and policies that control their backups. Management in MozyPro is “very fine-tuned,” according to Steve Fairbanks, director of product management for Mozy. “You can adjust backup sets and include or exclude file extention types according to policy.” Customers an also receive reports on backup job success rates, have alerts on failures sent to an administrator, assing backup quotas and administer roles with the new software. MozyPro for Mac will also be manageable through existing MozyPro for Windows management consoles for those who have a mix of Mac and PCs in their environment, Fairbanks said.

Both the Home and Pro editions have specific features to support Mac, including:

• Support of resource forks, alias and packages
• Spotlight Integration
• Native Cocoa Framework - Graphics are all native
• Mac Help System
• Menu Bar integration
• Native Apple Installer and installation process
• Mac-specific backup sets

One customer who’s been waiting for this rollout for quite some time is Walter Petruska, information security officer for the University of San Francisco. The University has MozyHome for Mac rolled out to some individual faculty and staff members, and the central IT department has been beta testing MozyPro for Mac for months. The plan is to roll MozyPro for Mac out to workstations used by the University’s distributed IT staff “so they can get a feel for Mozy from the client side,” Petruska said. However, the full rollout to all University servers and workstations will wait until there’s a MozyEnterprise edition for Mac.

EMC was coy when it came to whether or not there will be a MozyEnterprise for Mac, saying that MozyPro will meet most customers’ needs. But the MozyEnterprise edition that’s out now for PCs allows for more advanced management tasks like silent installs, deployment without software keys, and Active Directory and LDAP support fo security. Otherwise, Fairbanks said, “there’s very little difference” between MozyPro and MozyEnterprise.

To Petruska, however, the differences are significant. “We’re waiting to make the leap to a new backup paradigm across the University until things align and we can manage all PCs and Macs as well as servers from one console with LDAP and Active Directory integration,” he said.

Right now, workgroups and departments at the university have separate backup plans, and most of those backups remain on-campus in San Francisco, which is prone to earthquakes. Petruska said he’s looking forward to “getting everyone on the same sheet of music” and sending all backups offsite to the cloud. Most of the Mac users on campus today use EMC’s Retrospect software for local backups, but Petruska said MozyEnterprise for Mac would replace them.

Meanwhile, EMC says no edition of Mozy will replace Retrospect in its product line. Rather, according to a Mozy spokesperson, Mozy and Retrospect will be integrated going forward in packages like the one announced with Iomega’s external hard drives in July.

Staples to rebrand Mozy online backup service, EMC drops Fortress name

Office supplies giant Staples is adding a rebranded version of EMC’s Mozy online backup service to its Thrive online backup services, which already include a rebranded version of i365’s EVault for servers. The first release of Staples’ repackaging of Mozy will be targeted at laptops and desktops. Jim Lippie, president of Staples network services, says the Mozy Enterprise server edition will be added down the road.

In addition to office supplies and EVault, Staples also offers reactive online services for small business IT customers for breakfix and network support through a subsidiary called EZMobileTech. However, this is Staples’ first fully managed IT service , and it will use EMC’s Level 4 data center in New England (originally launched as Fortress) to store the data.

Staples was mum on exactly what customizations they’ve made to the Mozy platform. Mozy COO Mozy Vance Checketts also offered no specifics, but said customization options for data security and interface features are built in to the software for service provider partners like Staples so that modifications to the core product aren’t needed.

In the meantime, Checketts said, EMC is dropping the Fortress name and will refer to the whole infrastructure as Mozy for now. “We’re very carefully looking at what to call the next generation of technologies we’re pulling together - stay tuned for a new name,” he said.

My guess? VMware.

Seagate lets its services stand alone

Seagate is creating a new umbrella company for the services businesses the disk drive vendor has been accumulating over the last few years.

In 2006, Seagate acquired ActionFront Data Recovery Labs, which became Seagate Recovery Services. Last year Seagate added backup and recovery software and services vendor EVault, the Open File Manager product line from St. Bernard Software, and eDiscovery service provider MetaLincs. Those services have been known collectively as Seagate Services, but today were re-branded i365, a Seagate Company. (The “i” stands for information, 365 for every day availability.)

Mark Grace, general manager of i365, says the idea is to become a comprehensive group instead of a collection of acquisitions. “We’re committing ourselves to this space,” he says. “It showed good insight on the part of Seagate to chase this market.”

As of now, there isn’t much difference in i365 from Seagate Services besides the branding. The individual services and products will remain, Seagate will not break out i365’s financials, and Grace has already been running the services group. But he says there will be some integration of products “where it makes sense” such as combining data protection with retention and archiving with data discovery.

As for immediate changes, the St. Bernard product line will become part of the EVault family, and Seagate Recovery Services becomes part of the Professional Services platform. The current i365 lineup consists of: i365 EVault Data Protection, i365 MetaLincs E-Discovery for review of electronic information for legal needs, i365 Retention Management for recovering, migrating, restoring, and managing data for e-discovery purposes, and i365 ProServe Professional Services for training, consulting and implementing products.

The move separates the services brand from the overall Seagate brand, which is tied to disk drives.  “Seagate is a component manufacturing company. i365 is a product company,” Grace says. ” The go to market approach is totally different. We’re going to bring a different reputation to this space.”

Now i365 will compete as a service company with the likes of Iron Mountain and others looking to expanding into the SaaS space such as Symantec and CommVault. i365also competes with Seagate disk drive customers, mainly EMC, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. But Seagate claims its services group grew 39 percent year over year for its fiscal year 2008 while other companies were still plotting a move into services.

Grace says i365 will brace for the expanded competition by rolling out new services and products - bare-metal restore is coming soon - and perhaps a few more acquisitions down the road. “We’ll continue to grow organically and inorganically,” he said.

EMC’s Maui surfaces, then disappears

EMC blogger Storagezilla posted an interesting Flash animated video this morning about Maui, titled CloudFellas, in a post that has since been whacked. In the original post, ‘zilla alluded to ‘getting too far out in front of the boss’, so maybe that’s what happened (the post has been deleted from Google’s cache as well).

The video showed fun little animations about the spread of data to points around the world, and gave the example of a movie project where dailies from the set have to be sent to production houses for editing, then from the production houses back to the studio for vetting, and eventually out to movie theaters for distribution. Connecting multinational islands of data seemed to be a theme, as was scalability to petabytes, even exabytes.

This is important because EMC has yet to formally tell us just what Maui actually does. When Hulk/Maui were first discussed during EMC’s Innovation day last fall, it was assumed that Maui was the file system for Hulk’s hardware. But it turns out Hulk is shipping with Ibrix as its front-end file system, and according rumors that were going around about Maui at EMC World in May, Maui is instead a layer of software that sits above local storage pools, which could serve as a global data repository for multinational companies, tying multiple data centers together.

This even jibes with the codename - Maui is an island in Hawaii as well as the name of the Hawaiian god that raised the Hawaiian islands from the sea. Raising islands (of storage), joining them together in a chain… 

Then there’s ‘zilla’s comment this morning in his original post: “the internal cloud currently stretches from the east coast of America right into China.” He also mentioned that the business plan is executing to schedule, which would mean Hulk and Maui will both be formally introduced in the third quarter.