Nirvanix: Making the case for hybrid clouds

For many businesses feverishly embarking on the cloud journey, the goal of successfully deploying private cloud or leveraging public cloud could very well be like a mirage effect in the desert. While not all businesses will go the route of public cloud for security reasons, they may not even do a pure private cloud for cost reasons. That leaves the option of hybrid cloud since hybrid clouds do offer a suitable blend of security and cost effectiveness: Businesses can leverage private clouds for secure data, while offloading archive or tertiary copies into the public cloud. Unfortunately while vendors have gone to great lengths to make their public cloud offerings robust or their private cloud offerings secure, hybrid cloud offerings from many vendors leave a lot to be desired. Hybrid clouds marry private and public clouds together and like their human counterpart, need to know everything about the other party (and adjust accordingly) in order for the marriage to be effective. They need to be a team and interact as a team – not just two individuals living together. Incompatibility often does not bode well nor does finger pointing.

So what does this behavior mean in the cloud storage space? It needs to deal with federation, hand-off and data governance between the private and public components. Who does the business turn to when there are issues? Does the business have end-to-end accountability for all things data: Latency, Availability, Service Quality, Loss Prevention and Protection? How can the SLAs and SLOs be consistently enforced between the two clouds?

There may be lots of vendors claiming to have hybrid cloud capabilities but few can answer the challenges mentioned above. Take a typical hybrid cloud example. Let us say, a business deploys EMC Atmos for their private cloud and connects it to say and Amazon S3 or Rackspace Hosting public cloud. For one thing, these two clouds differ completely in terms of their architecture treating each other pretty much as black boxes when it comes to handing off data between the “private” and “public” components in this purported hybrid cloud system. This means that neither cloud party has visibility into the service levels offered by the other. The enforcement of service quality and consistency is left to the business that has deployed it. So should a component fail during the handoff, who does the business hold accountable?

So what are the key takeaways for businesses examining hybrid clouds?

The first one is that for any cloud provider, the fundamental differentiation should be based on its architecture. While anyone with some storage, data center space and a network pipe can claim to be a cloud storage provider, the ones that stand apart from the crowd are the ones that truly have a gold class architecture –one that is built from the ground up to withstand the rigors of modern day storage. Take Nirvanix for example. Its Storage Delivery Network (SDN) was designed to truly policy driven, service oriented and distributed in nature. Nirvanix has done a fabulous job in focusing on its architecture as the might which its business rests on as opposed to someone selling widgets that now decides to sell storage as a service.

The second is that businesses looking at hybrid clouds should consider the need to own and manage both ends of the storage network thus getting complete control how data is handed off, maintained and governed. Again using Nirvanix as the example, its private and public cloud offerings are based on the same architecture. This means that each side has full visibility into the other’s behavior and can adjust accordingly. It is an integrated solution. This is a critical differentiator as businesses can look to a single entity for all their service quality needs.

Nirvanix recently announced that it had brought on Paul Froutan who was head of global data infrastructure at Google as its CTO. This should help them take their strengths a notch above and be in a unique position to offer private, public and hybrid clouds that are based on the same world-class architecture. More importantly they will solve the fundamental issue plaguing hybrid clouds: Lack of integration between the private and public counterparts.