GigaOM » Andres Rodriguez

Storage: the crack cocaine of cloud computing

Barb Darrow — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 16:51:56 +0000

Okay, the analogy is imperfect, but, it is becoming clear that storage is the easiest way to get new customers into a given cloud. And, once they’re there, Amazon, Google, Microsoft can woo them with fancier (and pricier) higher-end services. The thinking is: Get them started with cheap storage, move them to compute and right on up the stack to data warehousing and analysis. Then you really have them hooked.

Microsoft is the latest cloud vendor to cut storage prices — less than a week after Amazon and Google cut prices three times between them — those cuts conveniently timed for the AWS: Reinvent show. Microsoft’s move, which takes effect December 12, cuts Azure storage prices by as much as 28 percent depending on volume, according to a blog post by Steve Martin, general manager of Windows Azure. The company last cut its storage prices 12 percent in March. With this latest cut, all three players are at the $0.095 mark for the first 1TB per month with some options and variability.

The new Microsoft price list:

And here’s the latest from Google, as of November 29. (DRA is a new Durable Reduced Availability storage option that lets users trade some data availability for lower price. Google positions it against Amazon’s reduced redundancy storage.)

And last but certainly not least, here’s the Amazon Web Services’ S3 status quo (also as of November 29.):

Crack analogy is wack

Tier 1 Research analyst Carl Brooks throws a bit of wet blanket on the crack analogy (thanks a lot, Carl) saying that all this price posturing is more about marketing than actual market forces — that few enterprises will be swayed by these incremental changes. But even if it’s PR, news of the cuts — which get wide coverage — might get some companies to look at cloud storage as an option — especially for disaster recovery and backup.

On the other hand, Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Nasuni, a storage management service provider, loves all this action because he thinks it will boost cloud storage adoption.

“Cloud storage may be a commodity component but it is by far the stickiest part of the full cloud stack. Once you get companies like Dropbox to put their storage with you, they will be using lots of compute and bandwidth and even applications (analytics, etc) to go with it. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are using storage as their loss leader to get the rest of the value stack,” he said via email.

Netting it out

Nobody’s going to pick up and move their digital stuff from one cloud to another at every price cut, but new customers looking for storage in the sky might be intrigued by these offers. And once they check into a given cloud, these vendors all bet it’ll be hard to quit.

Tier 1′s Brooks thinks we’re not even close to the bottom when it comes to cloud storage pricing, so stay tuned for more action from the big vendors.

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Nasuni scores $20M to build out storage sales effort

Barb Darrow — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 12:12:57 +0000

Nasuni, a company that helps distributed offices put their storage in the cloud and manage it securely, has $20 million in new funding to pay for new features and functions and expand sales and marketing.

The Series C round was led by a mystery investor, with other contributions from current backers Flybridge, North Bridge Venture Partners, and Sigma, and brings its total funding to $43 million.

The Natick, Mass.-based Nasuni competes with companies like Panzura, TwinStrata and StorSimple (which was just acquired by Microsoft) in that it lets companies pump their data into public or private clouds and manage it there.

Inside the firewall, Nasuni works with Microsoft Active Directory and supports the popular protocols — CIFS, NFS, iSCSI — that underly NAS and SAN storage. Outside, it can work with any of the major public storage clouds although right now it uses Amazon s3 as its primary storage back-end with Microsoft Azure as backup based on Nasuni’s assessment of their reliability. The data is encrypted from the get go, as well as throughout the process, so that no one — including Nasuni — can pry.

Given the Microsoft-StorSimple deal (the terms of which were not disclosed) the race by the cloud giants to acquire customers — and customer data — is on. That acquisition led to speculation that TwinStrata and Nasuni itself are on the block. Rodriguez denied that that is the case for his company. “We have bigger ambitions than that,” he said.

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Nasuni says it gives smartphones first class access to enterprise data

Barb Darrow — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:15:46 +0000

The debate around making enterprise data accessible to employees on their favorite devices has been raging for months. Now, Nasuni, a pioneer of enterprise-class cloud storage, is adding support for Android and Apple mobile devices in a way that it says won’t give IT departments fits.

In short, authenticated users can access their corporate documents from smartphones as securely as they can from their desktops. The key is that IT retains control and can enable/disable these devices individually, remotely wipe them as needed.

The problem of letting users access corporate data from personal devices is the crux of the whole BYOD debate that’s roiled of late. End users want to keep using their favorite devices and tools like Dropbox, but IT chafes at the notion of company data flowing to what they see as vulnerable endpoints.

Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez

“We extend the storage infrastructure so that you can access your files now with your iPhone with the same restrictions, the same security model that applies to your desktop computer,” said Andres Rodriguez, CEO of the Natick, MA-based company.

Rivals like Dropbox or VMware’s Horizon (aka Octopus) product also integrate with Active Directory but Rodriguez says there is a meaningful difference between integrating with AD and adopting or extending AD to other devices. Those other solutions rely on the creation of an array of peer-to-peer permissions to set access while Nasuni extends existing AD permissions for the user to his or her own other device.

Rodriquez sees Box as complimentary to Nasuni: “Box is good for sharing content outside the organization with contractors, ad or PR agencies etc — people outside your Active Directory. Nasuni uses the same file server you use now — we’re not trying to have you share something outside you’re own walls but we want you to be able to access it from anywhere.”

The new mobile functionality rolls out this week. Nasuni charges customers based on amount of storage under management. Extending internal enterprise security controls to external devices will be a trend. “II’d be shocked if in the next 12 to 24 months all the storage vendors aren’t doing this,” he said.

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Nasuni seeks to unify cloud storage

Barb Darrow — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 12:27:15 +0000

Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez

The concept of unified storage — in which both file and block storage are managed as one — was pioneered by storage hardware giants like EMC and Hitachi Data Systems. Unified storage technology enables one hardware device to handle both SAN and NAS storage protocols and thus supports both file and block storage.

Now, Nasuni, which manages cloud storage for businesses – mostly mid-sized enterprises as well as departments of bigger enterprises, — is following suit with what it’s calling Unified Storage for ROBO (ROBO stands for remote offices and branch offices.) That means Nasuni, which focused up till now on the file storage prevalent in most branch offices, now supports block storage as well.

“The majority of data in branch offices is in files — structured data but companies also use a lot of block storage. This lets me use one storage box for everything,” Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez told me in a recent interview. Nasuni will deploy this capability via a software upgrade to its controllers in the field and it will be available as of Tuesday.

Businesses can subscribe to Nasuni services either with or without an on-site hardware appliance. Nasuni is also upping the capacity of that appliance with a new NF-400 2U box with 32GB of RAM which supports 900 users and supports up to 6 TB or 12 TB of local cache. Price ranges from $12,500 to $17,500. The existing NF-200 1U box with 16 GB of RAM, supported up to 300 users and 3 TB or 6 TB of local cache. It lists from $4,000 to $6,000.

The need of companies to store data in the cloud is growing as is their need to be assured that this data is secure. For its customers, Nasuni acts like a traditional file system but puts the data in whichever cloud — Amazon, Rackspace, Nirvanix, etc. — is most appropriate at the time and moves it as needed. All the data is encrypted — neither Nasuni nor the cloud provider sees it.

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Cloud ‘lock-in’ survey shows not all clouds are alike

Barb Darrow — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:00:33 +0000

When it comes to moving massive files between storage clouds, performance depends — quite a bit — on which clouds you use, according to new research. For its report Bulk Data Migration in the Cloud, Nasuni repeatedly transferred 12 TB of data between its top-rated clouds–Amazon’s S3, Microsoft Windows Azure and Rackspace.

This was not an academic exercise for Nasuni because it manages customers’ encrypted data on these clouds and often transfers the data from cloud to cloud for optimum performance or redundancy. But the findings are broadly applicable to the many companies that are considering cloud storage options. Once they put their data in a given cloud, they want assurances that they’ll be able to move it as needs dictate. Surprisingly, Nasuni found the time it takes to transfer data varies considerably depending on which cloud is on the receiving end of that data.

Here are the top-line findings for moving 12TB of data from one cloud to another:

Amazon S3 to another Amazon S3 “bucket”: four hours
Amazon S3 to Windows Azure: 40 hours
Amazon S3 to Rackspace: just under one week
Microsoft Windows Azure to Amazon S3: Four hours
Rackspace to Amazon S3: Five hours.

“Why do we care? We deliver storage services to businesses and it’s important that we use the best components for the customers’ use case,” said Andres Rodriguez, CEO of Natick, Mass.-based Nasuni. ”If you want data to be synched globally, it’s extremely important to have fast throughput for reads, but more importantly for writes.” Storage systems typically take longer to write data than to read it.

The time it took for Rackspace to ingest data transferring from Amazon S3 was surprising and Rodriguez surmised that there was some sort of “throttling” going on there — although it’s hard to tell from the outside what’s actually happening. None of these cloud providers are particularly forthcoming about the niceties of their operations.

Another surprising finding was how variable Windows Azure performance was over time. The tests showed that Azure’s performance appeared to depend on the time of day the test was run.

With these kinds of migrations “you want maximum throughput and a consistent level of service … Microsoft’s bandwidth fluctuates a lot during the day which surprised us. They might have peak usages at those times of day. Cloud is shared by many users and if you don’t have the scale of an enormous thing like Amazon, you’ll be affected.”

This research builds on a Nasuni’s earlier Cloud Storage Report from December, which tested cloud service providers (CSPs) and designated Amazon S3, Microsoft Windows Azure, and Rackspace as top dogs in the field. Only six of 16 CSPs tested even made the cut.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user redjar

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Amazon cloud moves spook partners and customers

Barb Darrow — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:54:46 +0000

AWS CTO Werner Vogels

The more features that Amazon Web Services adds, the more nervous its partners — and even some of its customers — get.

AWS is the go-to public cloud infrastructure for many businesses. But as the company adds workflow services and richer databases, the fear of cloud lock-in grows.

What brought many customers to AWS in the first place was its inexpensive, plain-vanilla infrastructure — basic computing and storage. The beauty was you could “spin up” compute instances as needed when workloads spiked, and pay only for what you used. The fact that it was relatively easy to move workloads off of AWS, into your own data centers, or to another cloud, was also a draw.

Binding workloads to AWS

But the advent of new Amazon services such as DynamoDB database and Simple Workflow Services (SWF) means that workloads are getting tied more tightly into the AWS infrastructure. If developers write to DynamoDB, it’s harder to move their work to non-Amazon platforms. And SWF, which lets developers build workflow-enabled applications that bridge on-premises and AWS resources, blurs the line between customer site and AWS itself.

In many ways, AWS actions mirror what Microsoft did years ago. As Microsoft added more features to Windows or Office, other companies that offered those capabilities as add-ons fell by the wayside. Customers saw no reason to pay these companies for a feature that was included in software they already had — even if the third party product was better. What Microsoft added was “good enough,” was a common response.

In some cases, it makes sense for AWS to offer new services, says Andres Rodriguez, CEO of cloud-storage provider Nasuni. “Essentially anything that is useful to web applications at scale is going to be deployed at AWS. This is why they have made a big push for big data analytics, messaging (middleware or PaaS light) etc.,” he said via email.

Partners eye new features warily

Others, however, say these new services put AWS on track to become a full-fledged platform-as-a-service, a contention that AWS CTO Werner Vogels denied to ZDNet UK recently. Since many PaaS offerings, including Heroku run on AWS, that would be quite a conflict of interest.

SWF, which enables creation of application components that connect to each other, from a customer site to AWS, is the biggest issue for some. “Simple Workflow Services is a hose that sucks up information from the customer’s data center into Amazon’s cloud. Once that happens, it’s very hard to move off,” said the CEO of a software company that runs part of its offering on AWS but puts the bulk on another cloud provider.

An Amazon spokeswoman said the company remains committed to providing flexibility, and developers are free to use as many or as few services as they wish. ”By relying on Amazon SWF to handle the coordination of distributed task execution, developers can now focus on building the differentiating aspects of their applications,” she said. And, to be fair, there are clearly are some developers who welcome higher-level services.

Critics agree with that, but also said that those higher-level services impinge on what platform-as-a-service vendors — many of which run on AWS — already offer developers.

AWS friend or foe?

Will Shulman, CEO of MongoLab, which runs its NoSQL database service on AWS, said he is not perturbed about DynamoDB, the AWS NoSQL entry, because he does not see it as a direct competitor. But that could change. “If Amazon came out with a MongoDB service or another type of document database, that would clearly concern us,” he said.

Some customers, he said, do view DynamoDB, and the earlier, lower-end SimpleDB, as ties that bind them to AWS. “If you are using SimpleDB or DynamoDB, you can’t switch cloud providers. You can’t even develop your app on your laptop in an airplane without Wi-Fi because those databases only run on Amazon’s cloud.”

Others say the same about the new AWS Storage Gateway, which links data in the customer data center to AWS storage.

The long and short of it is that AWS remains the leader — by a wide margin — in public cloud infrastructure. But worries over whether it will stick to its knitting may lead to more defections. It has definitely already motivated many AWS customers to put at least some of their work on alternative clouds. Rackspace, SoftLayer and other companies could benefit from that.

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Dropbox: disruptor or flash-in-the-pan?

Barb Darrow — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 13:10:33 +0000

After Dropbox made it easier to move digital photos from smartphones to the cloud on Friday, the debate as to whether Dropbox itself is the next big disruptor or just a feature to be acquired or co-opted flared anew. The debate boils down to whether the web needs a neutral storage service that works pretty well with all the major technology platforms or if ease of use and synching is paramount.

By all accounts, Dropbox provides a slick way to upload and store digital paraphernalia in the cloud. From there, users can access their stuff from any device and sync files across devices. The service has been hugely popular: As of four months ago, Dropbox claimed more than 45 million users. But the success of the five-year-old company has bred imitators and competitors, including the biggest companies in tech.

The new private camera upload feature will let users take their photos as always but then easily move them from smartphone, tablet, camera or SD card to their cloud data trove using Wi-Fi or their cellular data plans. Dropbox uploads the photos and videos in their original size and full resolution to the user’s camera upload location. The feature is available now for Android phones with Windows, Mac and iOS support to come, Dropbox said.

Hardware makers hedge with Dropbox

This is one example of how Dropbox is trying to stay ahead of the curve and make itself an indispensable tool for connected consumers. In that, it has some formidable partners. Just this weekend at the Mobile World Congress, HTC said buyers of its new HTC One phones will get 25 gigabytes of Dropbox storage free for two years. Handset makers like HTC see Dropbox alliances as a way to combat Apple’s iCloud initiative.

Dropbox’s popularity has certainly been noted. Companies from Microsoft to Apple and (probably) Google are trying to mimic its capabilities. “Everyone wants to be Dropbox,” Andres Rodriguez, the CEO of storage specialist Nasuni, told me recently. Steve Jobs, the late CEO of Apple, reportedly wanted to buy the company. When that didn’t work out, Jobs called Dropbox “a feature, not a company” and launched iCloud.

That “feature versus company” meme has dogged Dropbox ever since and cropped up again this weekend when PandoDaily’s Farhad Manjoo weighed in on Jobs’ side of the debate:

Dropbox is a great little file-syncing app, and founder Drew Houston and crew are already making some nice money out of it. But is it a $40 billion company? I doubt it. And when I hear folks like Benchmark’s Bill Gurley suggesting that it might be, and calling Dropbox “a major disruption,” I wonder if they’ve simply been blinded by the thrill of using an obviously well-crafted utility.

Dropbox is slick, and it supports nearly all the relevant clients. But in Manjoo’s experience, that support is uneven. Dropbox is often flummoxed by OS- and application-level problems, he wrote.

But any neutral party without access to Apple’s native hardware hooks will be somewhat stymied. Plus, that only takes into account some of Dropbox’s value, argues Posterous co-founder and venture capitalist Garry Tan. On his blog, Tan writes that the tech giants (Google, Apple, Microsoft) that make their own OSes and applications have no incentive to make them sync well with others.

What are the odds of Apple getting their sync client right for PC’s? Just about zero, considering what they’ve done in the past with MobileMe sync.

Same goes for Microsoft writing sync software for the Apple platform. Arguably Google is in the best shape to provide a seamless multiplatform experience . . . well, except for iOS! The odds of a viable multi-platform option emerging from one of these big three seem slim to me.

Those who forget history . . .

The cautionary tale for Dropbox is that the best technology doesn’t always win. (I would insert the Betamax vs. VHS argument here, but no one remembers it anymore.) Should Microsoft, Apple or Google offer at least reasonably good cross-platform file storage and sync capabilities, Dropbox will be in trouble. Working in Dropbox’s favor is that CEO Drew Houston appears acutely aware of history.

According to this Forbes magazine account, when Apple announced iCloud, Houston shot off a memo to employees, reaffirming the company’s status as one of the fastest-growing companies in the world. Then he listed several other once-fast-growing companies: MySpace, Netscape, Palm and Yahoo.

Photo courtesy of Dropbox

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