In the spirit of David Letterman, I’ll work my way up to number one.

Number 5:  Anybody in the room able to get Wifi?

• Sad but true. This was the question asked by Alistair Croll as the Enterprise Cloud Summit (ECS) kicked off EARLY Sunday morning in Vegas, the attendees were not the only ones lacking connections. It appeared the Interop wireless networks were not yet fully operational. Ironic? Yes, we all thought so, too.  Except the guy next to me who had his AT&T mobile hotspot going. What happened to the good old days when someone sponsored the wireless at Interop?  AT&T are you listening?  To be fair, by Monday afternoon, the NOC boys seemed to have gotten the WiFi up and running.

Number 4:  Can somebody please relate this cloud thing back to the network?  

• Ah, network admins. Gotta love them.  While cloud took Interop by storm this year, not everyone was swept away.  In fact, I realized after my presentation that I really should have put up the OSI stack like I did last year.  Maybe just flash it every few slides as a subliminal pacifier.  Or perhaps we need to be better at showing how the cloud, at the end of the day, is the network, with all 7 layers represented J.   It just might not be your network.  There was one presentation, titled: “The Impact of Cloud Computing on the Network” by Jim Metzler. Good job!

Number 3:  Developers are going rogue to build new applications

• Finally, it wasn’t just marketing’s fault for all these rogue cloud adventures. Yep, developers are turning to the cloud in record numbers to build new apps, test new environments and play with new PaaS tools.  The answer for all this unruly behavior?  Deal with it and embrace it.  Chances are these guys are going to find creative ways to solve business challenges.

Number 2:    Traditional storage vendors need to move to the future

• In the session on “What’s next in storage”, industry experts Howard Marks, Stephen Foskett, Stu Miniman, and Mike Fratto, were not shy in their advice.  While much of this session sounded like a storage alphabet soup (iSCSI, SSD, DDS, FC, NAS, ODD, RAID, etc.), and focused on on-premise storage solutions, with flash being the darling of the session.  The experts made a great point of how storage needs to move to more object-based protocols and that overall, we need to start letting go of legacy technologies.

And my number one favorite thing over heard at Interop. . . 

Number 1:  Oh my god, like, you know . . .right?

• Not just once, but twice did I overhear a diatribe that would cause Shakespeare to turn in his grave.  I have teenagers, so I know how to translate this, but the last place I expected to hear this was on an Interop bus going to a private party.  Oh, and yes, she was blond, thank you for asking.  Perhaps the only thing better that this sentence was when she said, “oh my god, I think I’m going to be sick.”

Yep, it was a great show!

Vendor Cloud Positioning at Interop 2012

But ask attendees what they are looking to solve and cloud is barely on the radar, although they admit it’s happening whether they want it to or not.  On sessions covering cloud or big data, the question of “how does this relate back to the network” has been heard over and over.  In sessions on the future of storage, attendees wanted to deep dive into flash versus disk rather than cloud.

For this reason, it’s not surprising that when cloud is talked about or the cloud sessions that are crowded are focused on the private cloud, when enterprise IT still “owns” the infrastructure.  With private clouds, IT leaders can play with cutting edge solutions around distributed systems, like Hadoop or MapReduce or MongoDB and of course virtualization, but it’s all part of the comfortable network.

And when you walk into the Expo, the famous Interop NOC features a “data center” rack comprises products from across the sponsor list. I have to admit, there is something comforting about those appliances and wires and blinking lights. After all, I cut my high-tech teeth in the network security space.

Network Rack at Interop 2012

Where cloud is getting the biggest play is in discussions around big data, where IT managers are struggling to manage, backup, analyze and secure increasing numbers and size of data sets.

In my session on Monday, titled, “Future of Big Data: Distributed and Decentralized Models”, attendees agreed that our incredible data growth is forcing us to think about infrastructure and the cloud in new ways.

So, while vendors are betting their future revenues on the cloud, enterprise IT is not yet completely ready to leave its comfort zone. However, it’s also clear that whether they want to or not, even networking and infrastructure stalwarts will take bigger steps (whether they want to or not) from their racks to the cloud.

During my Interop session on distributed & decentralized approaches

It is now clear that, like Dropbox, Drive offers users the ability to define a single local folder, which is backed up to Drive and can be shared with other users. While this is certainly a step in the right direction, allowing each user to synchronize just one folder is extremely limiting. Nobody wants to pick and choose what information they want to protect; they want all their data backed up safely and securely to the cloud.

With just 5GB free, it would be difficult for most users to back up their entire hard drive on Drive for free. So Google is offering paid plans starting at $2.49 per month for 25GB. That is about 10 cents per GB per month, which is in line with other traditional cloud storage offerings. You can cut that rate in half by purchasing 100GB for $4.99 per m

Five cents per GB is competitive pricing. Has Google figured out a way to store data for less? Or are traditional providers really raking in the bucks with their higher pricing? Turns out it may be neither. A quick look at Google’s Terms of Service reveals this bit of insight – and my gut is Google is offsetting the costs with its ad revenue:

“When you upload or otherwise submit content to our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content. The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones.”

In all likelihood nobody from Google (or those they work with) will be reading, using or distributing your content, but knowing their history and primary source of revenue, it is likely that the files you upload will be used to further build out an advertising profile which will follow you around all Google properties.

For most consumer users this is probably neither surprising nor a major point of concern. After all, we have all gotten used to this with Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and every other ad-based service we use. But for businesses who are interested in protecting their data both from loss and the preying eyes of outsiders, this sort of policy seems a bit too invasive.

Every day, the news is filled with plans by Facebook, Google, Amazon, and many others for new, huge data centers.  Even with highly efficient servers, power-saving cooling systems and ingenious ways to leverage natural resources, such as locating the data center in the arctic, data centers are still  creating a large carbon footprint, hogging electricity and energy resources, and wreaking havoc on the environment.

The EPA raised the flag first, noting that some 2% of North American electricity consumption comes from data centers and servers.  And now, Greenpeace, the warriors of green, have come out with a comprehensive evaluation and scorecard of cloud computing vendors.  It’s not pretty, and shows most companies are not going beyond the bare minimum.

With some input form the Greenpeace research and our own expertise, we’ve come up with five ways to evaluate if your cloud is green:

1. Energy Consumption:  How many watts is your cloud vendor or your private cloud consuming?  Google consumes 260 million watts continuously; enough to power a city of 200,000 people.  Does your vendor employ virtualization, distributed systems or other efficiency measures?
2. Electricity Grid Strain:  Is your cloud powered by a data center that is located in one of these growing central data center areas, where multiple data centers are clustered in a typically rural area?  If so, it could be putting a huge strain on the regional electricity grid.
3. Pollution Contribution:  Just as behind every cloud is a data center – behind every data center is a power station, and ideally, your cloud is powered by a renewable energy source or at least a clean one.  However, Greenpeace reports that many cloud vendors are relying on less than clean sources, such as coal.
4. Rating on the Greenpeace Score Card:  Greenpeace just came out with new research on “How Clean is Your Cloud” and in it, they evaluate 15 cloud computing vendors and grade them from A to F on key green criteria. In the report, Greenpeace notes that   Amazon, Apple & Microsoft are rapidly expanding without adequate regard to source of electricity and rely heavily on dirty energy to power their clouds. Facebook and Google got some greenie points from Greenpeace for prioritizing access to renewable energy.  And Akamai is first company to report on its carbon intensity.  You can see the complete scorecard here
5. Use of Decentralized or Distributed systems:  Look for solutions that don’t rely on data centers at all.  Skype is a great example.  And so is Symform, with our peer-to-peer storage network

As expected, Google Drive launched today with 5GB free cloud storage and 1TB for $49.99.  That is aggressive pricing, but it does not fundamentally change the cloud storage model or economics. Google Drive still uses a centralized data center cloud storage model, where they are supporting the cloud with massive physical infrastructure.

So what? You ask.

The what is that this centralized model is not sustainable. Data is growing faster than we can build data centers to store it, and the combined costs of land, facilities, equipment, bandwidth, security and personnel to build and manage a data center is significant. And the cost of data centers is only going up. Sure, Google is big enough they can afford to lose money on the Drive initiative, but that cost has to be recouped somehow.  For most cloud storage vendors, the cost is passed on to the customer, which is why cloud storage is disproportionality more expensive than local storage drives.

Google Drive is shaking things up, coming out of the gate with what looks like a 5 cents per gigabyte – compared to 10 to 50 cents common with most cloud storage solutions. To do so, there are bound to be limitations or other gotchas. For example, Google’s last attempt at this was to provide storage through Google Apps, but it was fairly limited to data being generated through Google Apps. In Google Drive there also seems to be a strong focus on Google Apps integration.

It appears the only way you can get your “real” data into Google Drive is by uploading it using a browser.  This can be a painfully slow process if you have big files – it would be hard to get 5GB into the cloud that way, let alone 100s of GB or TBs.  For the service to be useful, it is critical that it can seamlessly work with your existing data and where you are generating most of your new data – files on your devices – Servers, NAS units, Desktops, laptops, etc.

I would to do a more in-depth analysis of the solution, but unfortunately Google Drive does not seem ready for prime time at launch.  Everyone I know is getting “we’ll let you know when we’re ready” message when trying to download or sign up. So more to come when I can actually play with it.

1. Who is happiest with their primary and secondary data backup solutions?

• For Primary Backup: the highest level of satisfaction (77%) was found in those who are using the cloud for primary backup.
• For Secondary Backup: The highest level of satisfaction was found in businesses that had outsourced the responsibilities for secondary backup. 79% of those leveraging Managed Service Providers for backup rated themselves as satisfied. Those who are using the cloud for secondary backup were next highest in satisfaction at 77%.

2. Who is the least satisfied with their data backup solution?

• Not surprisingly, those who are doing no primary backup are the least satisfied with their current backup solution. A scant 25% of those doing no primary data backup  indicated they were satisfied. And those doing no secondary backup showed a 49% satisfaction rate.

3. Who is the least likely to have secondary data backup?

• Those not engaging in secondary data backup show the following characteristics:
• Small companies – nearly 60% have fewer than 25 employees
• Small infrastructure –  nearly two thirds have 5 or fewer servers
• Small data – most have less than 5 terabytes of data
• Small growth –  a majority expect data growth of less than 20%

4. Whose data volumes are growing the fastest?

• Organizations that predicted their data to grow by 60% or more have the following characteristics:
• More likely to be an IT Service Provider.  They grow their volume of data under management two ways. The first is by gaining customers whose data they manage, and the second is having customers with rapidly growing data.
• More likely to already have a lot of data: 24% have more than 500 terabytes.
• More likely to have larger infrastructure: 25% have 100 or more servers
• More likely to be spending more on backup: 26% are spending more than $10,000 per year for offsite backup.

5. What data is getting backed up?

• A clear majority of the respondents reported backing up all of their data at least once a week. Thankfully, only 10% are backing up nothing. The most frequent reason given for not backing up data is that the data is not considered mission or business critical.
• So what is considered critical data? We asked, and the top three answers were:
• Financial Data = 70%
• Customer records = 65%
• Email and other communications = 65%

With the growing maturation of cloud computing, two distinct classes of cloud applications have arisen:  centralized and decentralized.

All of the facility build out I am talking about is powering centralized cloud applications. And in spite of the Internet being a truly decentralized network, surprisingly little energy or dollars are being spent on enabling decentralized cloud applications.

Most applications we see on the Internet today are hosted centrally in one or more data centers and take very little advantage of the capabilities on the edge.  Even some previously decentralized models, like email (SMTP), which was designed to be a decentralized application, have evolved into a centralized model, with mega email providers such as Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail – all of which are built on a centralized data center infrastructure. Business email is still fairly decentralized, although we do see a definite trend towards centralization there as well.

Interestingly, the same can be said about the Web (HTTP) itself.  The word “Web” was intended to define a true mesh across the Internet.  It is a mesh but a highly lopsided one, with the majority of Web Servers hosted across a few data centers.

Skype is one of the few decentralized cloud applications we see in widespread use.  While some users are not aware of this, Skype is a true peer-to-peer network, which routes communications through the bandwidth of network users.  In doing so, Skype has built the largest voice and video communications system without building much centralized infrastructure.

I’m a big believer of decentralized systems in general, so it’s not surprising that we built Symform as a decentralized, peer-to-peer cloud storage network. As I mentioned, the power of the Internet comes from it being decentralized.  It spreads organically and through natural economic drivers.

The Open Source movement is the same type of decentralized model, where no one person or organization is ultimately in charge, and yet, this is where its power and scalability thrive, as all members want to contribute to the movement and, in return, benefit from others’ contributions.

It is worth observing that all decentralized systems do have a central core of some sort that everyone must align to.  Standard specifications like TCP/IP, HTTP and HTML are at the core of the Internet.  Linux is at the core of Open Source movement. Skype owns and runs the core of its decentralized system. What ultimately made these systems successful was getting more and more people to start using the core in different ways to solve their own problems. What started as viral movements became revenue generating solutions and companies.

We should abstract this model and look across our IT stack to see other areas where decentralization can help drive cost savings, increased scalability and ability to better utilize our existing infrastructure, rather than building out more data centers.

And we should examine what is driving centralization of services like email and Web when they were designed to be decentralized? That will be the topic of my next blog post.

Symform celebrated Worldwide Backup Day with a tour of its RAID 96 worldwide data center for a lucky group of twenty one Symform customers and partners.  [Invitations to this sought after tour are handled by lottery. Please see lottery entry details at the end of this post.] After our guests arrived at Symform’s offices in Seattle, they went through the required identity verification and security checks. We then had a quick round of introductions before heading off to a new Symform customer in Albany, New York.  This customer visit was intended to give our guests a good context for learning about how data is readied for the journey to Symform’s worldwide data center.

Next Stop – Albany, New York

While onsite in Albany, we observed the customer’s data first being backed up using StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect on a Window server to create an onsite backup. Next we saw the data getting cut into 64MB blocks, encrypted and further cut into 64 fragments.  We always have to make sure everyone  pays close attention to this process because it happens so fast – even with 256 bit AES encryption of the blocks.  Watching the 32 redundancy fragments being added to each set of 64 turned out to be the highlight of the tour for several. This led to an interesting exchange about how these 32 fragments come to contain information about the other 64 fragments.  The group then enjoyed putting their fingers into the flow of encrypted fragments as they left the device. This ‘fragment tickling’ has become a bit of a tradition on these tours.  One of the visitors grabbed a fragment, held it up to an overhead light, squinted and confirmed for herself that the encrypted fragment “really is meaningless”.  Don’t worry, she put the fragment back into the flow.

Divide and Conquer

At this point we split up the tour into three groups to follow some of the encrypted data fragments from Albany and into Symform’s worldwide data center. Budget and time concerns kept us from following all of this customer’s many thousands of fragments across the globe, so we picked three fragments and followed them to their destinations.

Nordic NAS Node - Contribution in Copenhagen

Our first group followed a fragment to one node in the worldwide data center — a QNAP TS-459 Pro+ Turbo NAS in Copenhagen. There they saw not only their fragment of interest, but many other “meaningless” fragments in that device’s contribution folder.  Some took advantage of another chance to wiggle their fingers in the encrypted fragment flow.  [My confession: I do this any opportunity I get -- it is a really strange feeling.  And because no data fragments flow through Symform offices or storage devices, we can’t to do this at work.]  Praerit Garg, Symform’s President and tour guide for this group, then pointed out all of the monitoring functionality on the device so that Symform can assess the health and availability of this device as part of the worldwide data center.  The mood of the partner group markedly shifted as they solemnly watched fragments leave the worldwide data center to restore data to a Symform customer in need.  “I know it works from doing a test restore, but it was very sobering to see data fragments leaving and knowing that someone is trying to recover from a data disaster”, said one partner.

Redundancy is Power 

Our second group gained unintended insights into the workings of Symform’s worldwide data center. The fragment they followed arrived in Tulsa, Oklahoma and was deposited in the contribution folder of a Mac server just before a violent storm swept through and knocked out power across northeastern Oklahoma. Their tour guide explained that while the fragment they followed was not available, it would take only 64 of the 96 fragments to reconstitute the 64MB block of data.  Bassam Tabbara, Symform’s CTO and guide for the second group noted, “People always ask us ‘What if a node in the worldwide data center goes down?’ We tell them it is not a matter of if, but when.  We expect there will be problems.  That’s why we designed such a high level of redundancy into the worldwide data center.”   The group waited in vain for power to be restored before deciding to head back early to Seattle.

Singapore, Instant Restore and More

The third group, led by Margaret Dawson, Symform’s VP of Marketing and Product Management, followed an encrypted fragment to Singapore. There they saw their fragment in the contribution folder. They left Singapore almost immediately (no lunch!)  to enjoy the added benefit of following a copy of their fragment to an Instant Restore device. The customer in Albany, New York had set up another Windows server as an Instant Restore device at their distribution center in Schenectady, New York about 20 miles (32 km)  away from their main offices. Dawson explained, “When the customer makes changes to files in Albany, those changes are automatically synchronized to the Symform worldwide data center and then from the data center to the customer’s Instant Restore device in Schenectady.  Instant Restore allows the customer to keep a hot copy of their data near their place of business while still having the protection of the worldwide data center.”  One member of this tour group who had not already set up an Instant Restore device for his data shared his reaction, “I sure know what I am going to be doing on Monday.”

Back to Seattle

After their worldwide data center tours, the three groups reconvened at Symform’s offices in Seattle where each group reported on what they had observed at their part of the data center. As the groups pieced together what each had seen, they realized the customer in Albany was using a best practice for data protection – Local backup using ShadowProtect, Cloud backup using Symform’s worlwide data center and a nearby hot copy of their data using Symform’s Instant Restore.

The post-tour debriefing session was followed by a cocktail reception and a planked salmon beachfront dinner with competing views of both the sunset over the Olympic Mountains and the twinkling lights of the Seattle skyline.

If you would like to be entered into the lottery for the 2013 Symform worldwide data center tour, please contact us at marketing@Symform.com. The date for the 2013 tour will again be on Worldwide Backup Day. The drawing for the tour invitations will be held in late February. Invitations are non-transferable.

Oh, yeah, and one more thing . . . . APRIL FOOLS!!!!

This has been part of the company’s plans since they received their first round funding, company executives say. “We’ve actually had this in the works for some time,” Margaret Dawson, head of Symform Lunar, ”We’re on a distributed network, and broader distribution means better data security. Now, our clients’ data will be safe from, say, medium-sized asteroid strikes and supervolcanoes.”

Symform executives say that adding a data center on the moon was the only way to improve the security and stability of their network. The biggest challenge was data transfer. Symform engineers quickly ruled out stringing optical fiber 384,000 kilometers to the moon.

After testing several possibilities, they determined that faster-than-light neutrinos were perfectly suited to the job. “The coolest part is, you data actually arrives at FMDC before you send it,” said Dawson.

Users won’t have to pay any additional fee to use the world’s first extra-terrestrial cloud backup facility. When the center goes online, shards of Symform customer data will immediately be transmitted to the moon.

Fra Mauro Data Center will be completely automated, drawing power from a combination of a solar array and small windmill. The data center should be live by September 31, 2017. Symform chose Space T as the launch provider, citing Space T’s launch 10 tons, get 2 free program as a strong incentive.

After completion of FMDC, the company plans to open additional centers on Mars’ Olympus Mons and in the asteroid belt.

Oh, yeah, and one more thing . . . . APRIL FOOLS!!!!

Download research results now!

And here’s the five reasons why this survey is important to you!!

#1 –  It’s a big survey. With nearly 600 valid responses, the results involve a meaningful sample and can be statistically significant. So many surveys we see these days have maybe 100 or 150 responses. While no data is perfect, I think you’ll find this first overall analysis interesting. And we’ll be slicing and dicing the data in the coming weeks, so let us know if you have any ideas by contacting marketing@symform.com.

#2 – It has a broad set of respondents. It provides insights into Small, Medium and Enterprise class backup practices, budgets, opinions, pain points and data growth predictions. We can also look at the data for selected industries such as Financial Services and Health Care. No matter what segment you are in or what segments you target, there is is important information for you.

#3 — It covers primary and secondary backup.  It shows the mix of primary and secondary data backup solutions in place and the level of satisfaction with them. Interestingly, the most satisfied with their secondary backup are those who are outsourcing their backup to MSP/IT Solutions Providers. Speaking of which…

#4 – You’ll gain insights into MSP/IT Solutions Providers. Even if you aren’t an MSP/IT Solutions provider you will want to see what they are doing and what they think. They live and breathe data backup and recovery on behalf of their contracted clients. And if you are an MSP/IT Solutions Provider, here is a chance to benchmark.

#5 — It is really fresh research.   The survey was in the field in February 2012 and worth looking at now. We’ve noticed that a lot of research gets re-circulated or continues to be used 12, 18 or even 24 months after completed.  With this industry moving so fast, it’s hard to find that data meaningful or helpful in our current reality.