Hello again, I’m Chris Schin and I run Products for Zetta. It has been quite some time since I posted, but in the interim we launched the Zetta solution into the market, and I now have a few minutes of free time to devote to this space.
Recently I presented at Sys-Con’s Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, doing a session entitled “Hosting Primary, Unstructured, Enterprise Data in the Cloud.” The session was well-attended and there was enough interest in the topic from those in the audience to prompt me to put virtual pen to paper and adapt the content for posting here to continue the dialogue.
Upfront, let me say that the weekend before the conference, I tried desperately to shorten the wordy, adjective-laden title of my session – removing each of the words one at a time, trying to see if I really needed them all. Each time I pulled a word out, I wound up putting it back in, because the title of the session really defines precisely what we’re built to do – Zetta was designed and built for the express purpose of hosting primary, unstructured, enterprise data in the cloud.
Why is that an important point to bring up? Because, any system is designed and architected to fulfill a unique set of requirements, and those requirements in turn reflect the intended use and intended users of that system. Thus, since Zetta was built to host primary, unstructured, enterprise data in the cloud, it stands to reason that its architecture and design successfully address the requirements that we believe should be met before an enterprise should ever consider putting primary data in the cloud.
Let’s take a look at another example – if I say the words “cloud storage” to you (and you’ve been paying attention to the market as it has evolved over the last 2 or 3 years), you probably get a pretty clear picture in mind (and possibly even a few logos) – today’s cloud storage market is dominated by solutions that are HTTP-centric, leverage RESTful protocols, utilize an “opaque bucket”/“object” storage paradigm, use an eventual consistency model, offer only replication for integrity, etc. Why do these solutions share these characteristics? Because the design of a good system reflects the requirements of its intended uses, and those solutions were built to serve the needs of a Web application, and as a result those features map perfectly to the requirements of a Web application developer writing a Web application.
However, those solutions were not built to serve enterprise customers, do not fulfill the unique requirements of an enterprise customer, and are not easily adopted by today’s enterprise customer.
This blog series drills into the requirements that an enterprise IT professional should expect to be met before he puts his primary data in the cloud. At Zetta, we believe those requirements include:
- Accessed like traditional storage
- Easy to use, enterprise features
- Comprehensive data integrity/protection
- Data security/privacy
- Continuous availability
- Non-blocking performance
- Administrative transparency and control
- Good investment value
In the coming weeks, I will drill in on each of these requirements, and how Zetta tackled each.
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[...] Zetta Scalabytes Blog In this blog, hear from Zetta’s founders and leaders about cloud computing, storage and data management best practices and Zetta Enterprise Cloud Storage technology. « Blog Series: Hosting Primary, Unstructured Enterprise Data in the Cloud – Part 1: Introduction [...]
[...] data in the Cloud. For your convenience, I have reprinted the list of requirements from my initial post again – note that I will continue to do this and will link from this list to previous posts as [...]
[...] Hi – for those of you just tuning in, this is part four of a 9-part blog series in which I am describing the Zetta solution, and how it is built from the ground up to host primary, unstructured enterprise data in the Cloud. Here again is the list of requirements; the first two have already been addressed, along with an introduction to the series: [...]
[...] Introduction [...]
[...] Introduction [...]
[...] Introduction [...]
[...] Introduction [...]
[...] Introduction [...]