On Tue, 06 Dec 2011 10:32:24 -0500, <[email protected]> wrote:
Good morning LOPSA:
The powers-that-be have tasked me with the dubious honor of assessing
the IT services that are currently hosted in-house which are ripe for
moving "into the cloud". I was given a specific list of services to
"start me off" and they include the usual candidates (email, web sites,
etc.) however they also threw me a curve ball by including "file
shares". I struggle to imagine how we could possibly move CIFS file
shares out of the local network and maintain anything resembling decent
performance and the level of control (permissions, extension filtering,
quotas, etc.) we currently have with a cloud service; not to mention
securing the traffic effectively and ensuring privacy. My gut reaction
is that file shares just aren't good candidates for "cloud services".
Believe it or not, these do exist. Amazon now has a Direct Connection
option
http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/
Which can give you a full L2 connection to the AWS cloud. Make your filers
in EC2, access them over a fast L2 connection. You'd run your filers on an
EC2 instance and manage it the way you always have, it's just on an
infrastructure you don't have to maintain (or own). We just turned one on,
and latency is really low (2.7ms for us) and I've had full GbE transfer
across it.
Or you can go the IPSEC-based VPC route, which does much the same thing
just not as low latency (or fast).
Whether or not it's cost-effective, well... you'll have to do the math
about that. Generally speaking for always-on systems, hosting your own
tends to be cheaper because you can amortize costs over multiple years.
Another option I just fount out about here at Lisa is StorSimple. It's a
kind of HSM system, where it'll keep the hot data on local cache and put
rarely accessed data to the cloud. Again, cost-effective depends on what
you plan on doing with it.
--
Law of Probable Dispersal:
Whatever it is that hits the fan will not be evenly distributed.
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