ByteandSwitch: “Every week or so one major internet service or another goes down for a moment, Amazon S3, Google Apps, Twitter etc… Let’s face it, if you store data in the cloud there are a hundred variables between you and your data and if any one of those variables decides to, well, be variable, then you may not be able to get to your data for a period of time. This does not mean that you can’t use the cloud, it means that you can’t put data that you are going to need immediate access to solely in the cloud. What this does mean is using a hybrid model for cloud storage. As we demonstrate in our latest video “What is Hybrid Cloud Storage?” a hybrid cloud is an appliance that is placed on the customer’s site to act as a intermediary storage location for data that is in route to the cloud. The appliance serves many purposes: translation from CIFS/NFS to more internet friendly protocols, local cache for rapid restores of last copy of a backup or archive and as a place to get to data that would otherwise be inaccessible due to some sort of connection issue.”
– This actually makes perfect sense to me. One issue that often comes up when discussing a cloud environment, besides access to data, is speed. We have started using thin clients here at the hospital in place of desktop machines, and there is little doubt that performance has suffered. With the option discussed in the article above, data would move quickly between you and the local environment while in use, but slowly moved into the cloud in the background. I like it.
