Cloud storage gateways for data protection

BANGALORE, INDIA: Proliferation of data today is driven by increasing personal and company-issued endpoints - smartphones, tablets and other smart devices - and explosion of data heavy applications, including video and voice over-IP.

Cloud storage promises several advantages while addressing information explosion: pay for only the storage used, near real-time scalability, access to data from any location, and freedom from worrying about protecting and managing data stored in the cloud.

Also Read: Data sharing opportunities outweigh challenges

However, these advantages are often elusive due to limited bandwidth, slow transmission speeds, large data sizes, concerns about security and the inability of applications to talk to cloud storage. 

Cloud storage gateways help organizations overcome these challenges and provide a smooth onramp to the cloud. One of the more successful use cases for cloud storage gateways is for storage of back-up data sets.

Back-up data sets are large, de-duplicate well and have more lenient response requirements.  Cloud storage gateways can also eliminate the time investment required while using tape for data protection.

Though tape and cloud storage claim significant cost advantages, most cloud storage gateways provide encryption, de-duplication and create an off-site copy of data without additional charges.

Most back-up applications will require additional software and licenses for de-duplication and encryption and may require additional hardware to handle the increased processing load. Off-site storage (vaulting) of tape media will incur monthly charges by the vendor and additional charges for returning tapes outside of the scheduled delivery dates.

If a company has multiple remote offices the costs of local tape devices and off site vaulting can be significant.

After the installation of one of these devices, what can one expect?

Tape technology requires substantial time to manage the tape media and off site tape rotation. Vaulting of tapes to provide a safe disaster copy of the data can be expensive. An engineering company reportedly spent over $28,000 per year to vault tapes for data centre and branch offices. With the elimination of tapes, their back-up process is more efficient and up to 60 per cent more cost effective.

Another benefit is better business continuity, with the ability and confidence to get an office up and running much faster, and quick, secure access to data on the cloud.

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Companies that eliminate tape from their back-up process free up administrator time - 100 hours per year at one company and elimination of hiring an additional back-up administrator at another. These highly skilled people now spend more time on high impact IT projects creating a competitive advantage for their companies.

An IT company planning to upgrade its tape library saved $1,00,000 by implementing a cloud storage gateway instead of a much larger multi drive tape library to meet the back-up window of their growing data set. 

While selecting a cloud storage gateway, keep in mind five considerations:

1) Strong security- The gateway must ensure data is secure in storage and during transmission through strong data encryption, which not all cloud storage providers offer.

2) Local cache — Caching the data in the gateway accelerates response times and productivity by responding quickly to user requests. As 85 per cent of restore requests occur within 30 days of a file being backed-up, a local cache will improve productivity by providing faster response.

Without a local cache the gateway will have to access data from the cloud which may incur transmission charges from the cloud storage provider and slow system response. Look for products that offer redundant storage to eliminate data loss and interruption of services.

3) Provide de-duplication and compression — A few companies have network bandwidth; what they have is increasingly consumed by multimedia, IP phone and other content. 

De-duplication and compression reduces the amount of data that needs to be transmitted as well as the storage consumed in the cloud. This can reduce storage and transmission costs, and traffic on the network — to the order of 10-30X. If the data cached within the gateway is also de-duplicated, far more data can be stored locally.

As larger data sets cost more in monthly storage fees, implement the best de-duplication technology.

4) Support a range of applications and cloud storage vendors - Gateways offer either a block based or file based interface. File-based products are faster and easier to implement, have major advantages for VMware environments and eliminate additional hardware requirements.

For file-based gateways, look for those that support the popular Common Internet File System and Network File System protocols. Make sure it fully supports applications that will be used with the gateway. Check the support that is available should things not work as expected, since many offer limited support capabilities.

Broad support of popular cloud storage providers is a must for freedom from vendor lock-in.

5) Solutions to fit your needs today and tomorrow — Vendors offer either hardware or virtual gateway appliances, or both. Hardware gateways provide easier installation, better performance and larger local caches. Virtual appliances are suited to smaller environments, remote offices and as an inexpensive DR solution, however, require knowledge of hypervisors to install and manage the gateway.

Cloud storage gateways allow companies to improve data protection and DR capabilities while leaveraging the advantages of public cloud storage. IT administrators can shift focus from mundane tasks to high impact projects. As information volumes increase, we can effectively and cost-efficiently manage it with cloud storage gateways.

The author is a marketing evangelist at Riverbed (APAC & Japan).

(The opinions expressed here in are the author's and do not represent CIOL's view in anyway)