storage service providers

Storage vendors still forecasting heavy cloud cover

If you think the hype about cloud computing has peaked, think again.

Vendors who build their hardware and software around cloud computing say it has a solid grasp on the service provider market and is getting ready to cover the enterprise.

Sajai Krishnan, CEO of cloud storage startup ParaScale, says service providers are heavyily committed to the cloud and others are coming around as they grasp its value.

“The cloud is still a fuzzy concept, despite all this religion around it,” Krishnan said “You need to spend a couple of hours talking about it, then the light bulb goes off. But for people who only read the occasional article, it still raises more questions than it answers.”

He thinks enterprises are ready to turn to clouds, initially with the help of service providers.

“It’s not either/or,” he said. “For certain large applications, we’ve seen folks roll out an internal cloud and for other things they go external. When you have an application that’s running inside an enterprise four or five years, take it out and put a VMware wrapper on it, test it and put it back into production, an IT shop doesn’t have the cycles to do that. If a service provider has the expertise to handle something like that, it drives up the value of cloud storage inside these companies very quickly.”

During his company’s earnings call with analysts Monday night, 3PAR CEO Dave Scott said the storage systems vendor is anticipating a shift toward the cloud. 3PAR has long billed itself as a utility storage company and counts service providers as large customers.

“We believe that we are in the midst of major secular trend with cloud computing as an ultimate replacement of much of the information technology that is currently owned and operated by enterprises,” Scott said.

For now, much of that trend is driven by service providers.

Tier1 Research pegs the cloud service market at around $300 million this year with cloud storage making up about 40 percent to 60 percent of that. Tier1 analyst Antonio Piraino says he considers storage “low-hanging fruit” among cloud services.

Krishnan says the service provider market is starting to split into three areas. One is the mass-market cloud service providers such as Amazon S3, Google, and Rackspace. The second area is smaller providers who combine virtualization, multi-tenant storage clouds and private hosted clouds. The third segment consists of the large telcos such as AT&T, etsVerizon Business, and Deutsche Telecom.

“Service providers are beyond the confusion and in the fourth quarter you’ll see a whole slew of announcements around cloud services,” Krishnan said. “They know the technology. On the enterprise side, there’s still a lot of confusion. When you talk about cloud, Amazon comes to mind first.”

Cleversafe powers up ‘Storage Internet’ service

Startup Cleversafe Inc. is preparing to launch a new online storage service based on its dsNet product, with data centers on each of the three major power grids in the U.S.

Since coming out of stealth two years ago, Cleversafe’s goal has been to deliver dsNet as a service. So far, the company has sold a few systems to service providers in the company’s home area of Chicago, but it has yet to realize its original vision of a “Storage Internet” in which data is distributed geographically.

The new service is currently in beta testing and four data center locations have been built out, three in Chicago and one in Omaha, Nebraska. By the end of March, Cleversafe officials say they expect to double that number of data centers and extend the dsNet service across U.S. power grids in the West, East and Texas interconnect. Each power grid will have two data centers, and each data center would utilize multiple internet service providers for redundancy.

Cleversafe’s SliceStor storage nodes can break up a single file into up to 11 pieces for redundancy. The Cleversafe hash appended to each slice for reconstruction also provides built-in encryption. The company is selling dsNet systems into end user and service provider accounts with customizable fault tolerance, but the dsNet service would have 8-6 or 8-5 redundancy, meaning eight slices across each data center with either five or six nodes required to reconstruct files.

dsNet might eventually be able to act as a content delivery network (CDN) as well as a storage service, according to director of customer solutions Alan Holmes, so that files can be delivered without requiring a separate Accesser node or client, as is required today. “We have a technology differentiator already built in to dsNet,” Holmes said. “Because of the way we reconstruct files, we already query the network for the nearest server many times per second.”

The Museum of Broadcast Communications (MBC) is an early adopter of the service, thanks to a chance online connection between the museum’s website and Cleversafe founder Chris Gladwin. The museum, also a brick-and-mortar institution in Chicago since the late 1980’s, was struggling to host digital files for download on its website, and sent out a letter to members announcing the discontinuation of that service two years ago. Gladwin received that notification, according to MBC founder and president Bruce DuMont, and got in contact with the museum to offer the dsNet service.

Neither DuMont or Cleversafe would disclose the specific financial details of Cleversafe’s relationship with MBC, but DuMont said MBC had agreed to partner with Cleversafe for its online content distribution for 10 years. “Right now, we’re in year two,” he said.