Nicos Vekiarides

While the notion of Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) may seem a bit far-fetched, Shadow IT, where users essentially bring unauthorized cloud services into business environments, has become an increasing corporate concern as highlighted in a recent CFO.com article. The risk of Shadow IT is that it compromises IT’s ability to maintain a standardized infrastructure across employees and business units, opening the door to potential security and reliability issues. In spite of this, there is a benefit in analyzing Shadow IT to understand why users adopt non-standard processes and what benefits existing IT could not deliver. It often pays to examine how employees creatively accomplish their goals in constrained environments and figure out how to accommodate those employees in a supportable fashion. Shadow IT is not just limited to cloud. In a close parallel, many IT organiza... (more)

Measuring Cloud Storage Performance: Blocks vs. Files

What are some good reasons to adopt cloud storage? Cost, durability and flexibility. So let me talk about performance, instead. Look at this graph: As part of our daily testing, we do routine performance measurements across a broad swath of cloud storage providers. It gives us a check to ensure that the various CloudArray subsystems are performing as they should, and gives us the data to make optimization decisions. In this particular test, we measure transfer rates at various buffer sizes. We “fill the pipe” by queueing up multiple streams of data simultaneously, initiating on... (more)

Cloud Storage Gateway Market Starting to Catch Fire

You may have seen Amazon’s announcement of the AWS Storage Gateway beta here, here, and here. Truth be told, the cloud storage gateway market is starting to catch fire. Amazon’s move validates the need for an iSCSI cloud storage gateway to easily deliver cloud storage into business environments and acknowledges that integration through APIs is not a process businesses will easily embrace. The deeper implication is that gateways facilitate the adoption of cloud storage as an alternative to on-premise or off-premise traditional storage, helping Amazon tap into a large multi-billio... (more)

Ten Hot Trends in Cloud Data for 2012

It’s time to make a few predictions for 2012 in the cloud data space. 2011 was a year of adoption, during which many companies started to leverage the cloud, enjoying the economies of scale, security and ease in managing their growing data needs. Those successes promise even greater cloud adoption in 2012. With that in mind, here are 10  predictions for hot trends to watch for in the cloud data space: Hybrid data storage environments combining cloud storage with existing storage. For most companies, the notion of moving all of their data to the cloud is not fathomable. However, ... (more)

Measuring Cloud Storage Performance

There are many excellent reasons to use cloud storage, but fast and efficient transfer of large amounts of data isn’t usually listed as a benefit. That’s one of the reasons why people use cloud storage gateways: to speed up cloud storage access. Recently, I realized we’ve never published any details on the performance gains that one should expect when using the CloudArray storage gateway, so I decided to create a simple illustrative test. In this article, I describe the results and explain some cloud storage implementation details that contribute to performance differences. I ca... (more)