Storsimple's Ursheet Parikh battles against "cloud washing" and redefines cloud computing with Hybrid Cloud strategy

 

Storsimple started in May 2009, at the bottom of the depression, after exceptional reception from the VCs. Prior to this, Ursheet was working at Cisco and before Cisco.  Storsimple is pioneering In-bound marketing, as opposed to top-down marketing, because they want to be acknowledged by their peers above eveything.  All engineers in the company have a 20+ years of experience in the storage industry, and having 15-20 of such people is according to Storsimple's CEO a recipe for success. 

 

Their approach has been very conservative, starting with a beta with a few customers and they are now planning to go live by the beginning of 2011. They have the financial backing to do this and they make sure that all the customers go through the beta test in a very thorough fashion. There are no small vendors left in storage and therefore, Storsimple is walking on eggs and thinks that they should build a business and not just a product, and they don't want the start-up to finish when the initial product is delivered. 

 

a cruisade against "cloudwashing" 

 

Ursheet's favourite word of the year is "cloudwashing". He says that almost anyone is trying to sell stuff labelled as "cloud computing", and "cloud washing" happens when vendors are selling things labelled as cloud computing when their solutions have nothing to do with it; yet, cloud computing is really important if it's not trifled with.  For most CIOs, their budgets is a subset of revenue and IT can only do what its budget can achieve and this is why cloud computing is so appealing to IT managers. Enterprises need to embrace cloud computing just to stay in sync with competition. So much so that Urshreet thinks that the leaders in that space in a few years won't be the equipment manufacturers but service providers like Orange Business. "A new set of players delivering IT as a service are cropping up and they will come to the fore", Ursheet said. 

 

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CXOs have different options in terms of cloud computing strategy depending on their requirement:

  

• SAAS, for which apps move to the cloud
• PAAS (platform as a service), for which apps have to be rewritten
• Public cloud compute with vendors like Amazon EC2
• Public storage with Amazon S3 for instance
• Private cloud technology, with vendors like EMC Atmos

all of these strategies have issues (re. slide above) and Storsimple is adding an option to that list with what they call their Hybrid cloud strategy, which in Ursheet's mind is addressing the full spectrum of the requirement, from core services and security to the end-user. Yet, Storsimple is not working against storage nor cloud service providers, Ursheet Parikh added, on the contrary;  it is aimed at providing a front-end interface to these vendors' hardware and cloud solutions. 

 

the problem: data explosion in the data life cycle 

 

Collaboration has become a must if one wants to avoid the explosion of the amount of content and the amount of copies of files that exist. De-duplication is helping but it doesn't necessarily solve the issue Ursheet said: even with de-duplication, companies still back up vast amounts of data and move them around across servers. This is what is called "content communism" i.e. that no one wants to know what is there and no one wants to clear the data. What Storsimple is doing is to analyse the working set, put that in local storage and use central storage for the rest. Now, the challenge with cloud computing usage are integration, performance and security. 

taginlineimportthe solution: hybrid storage by Storsimple 

 

With hybrid storage in the Microsoft enterprise environment as seen by Storsimple can be summed up in a few points: 1. instant provisioning is made available, 2. the storage disk is made available straight from the user's desktop, as a separate network iSCSI hard drive but instead of being in the private cloud of the client, it is stored centrally, 3. Storage performance is managed centrally by Storsimple through tiered storage (SSD, SAS and Cloud), weighted storage layout and real-time de-duplication. One of the most striking function offered by Storsimple is that which goes by the name of "Cloud clones".

 

Storsimple Cloud clones are snapshots of current data changes and are stored in the cloud, as if some kind of mirroring, but not in real time. This is making backups and disaster recovery (DR) far easier and less complex according to Storsimple's CEO. Snapshots can be done every 4 hours (whatever frequency clients want) and data is saved centrally on the cloud every now and then. This operation is transparent for users and is not wearing on the performance of each individual desktop. Clones can be launched overnight in case users or enterprises prefer to do so. In terms of Cloud acceleration, there is a home-developed algorithm to optimise local storage vs. central storage and include compression so as not to put the burden on the user. Pricing is done only on hardware capacity (ingested content, so you don't pay for the compressed footprint but for the uncompressed one), all the functionality is included. The end result is an average 80-90% cost reduction for clients. 

 

Sharepoint 

 

Ursheet concluded by saying that this solution is very well suited to Sharepoint too, mainly when it comes to solving the huge storage issues related to Microsoft's online file sharing service. Archival online is also possible, therefore putting an end to this "content communism" issue highlighted above, thanks to compression and remote data retrieval.