Abstract:
Cloud drives, which are accessed over the Internet with client-side software, are useful for backing up files. A cloud drive provider may offer a limited amount of online storage space for free and additional storage space for a monthly or yearly fee. The name "cloud" is derived from the symbol for the Internet on flow charts.
Cloud drives make it possible for a small business or individual to store and sync documents and other electronic media without having to purchase or maintain external hard drives or file servers. Cloud drive services are recommended for backups of 1 terabyte (TB) or less. The service provider is responsible for maintaining the servers, ensuring availability and providing easy access to the stored data.
http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/definition/cloud-drive
Cloud Drive is online storage Drive
Cloud drive storage is the mounting of storage capacity provided by a cloud storage serviceso that it appears to the server as a normal drive letter. In this manner, the server can treat the cloud storage as if it were a drive on direct-attached storage or a shared storage filer so files can be easily saved to and restored from the cloud.
This practice makes it easy for applications to access the cloud storage -- no middleware or special cloud storage APIs are required; the application just needs to know what drive letter it should direct its requests to.
The term “cloud drive” has been popularized in part by Amazon, which offers the Amazon Cloud Drive cloud storage service but many other services offer the same interface and access to cloud storage.
This was last updated in August 2011
Posted by: Margaret Rouse
1.
Advantages of Cloud
Data Storage
Storing extremely
large volumes of information on a local area network (LAN) is expensive. High capacity electronic data storage devices
like file servers, Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS)
provide high performance, high availability data storage accessible via
industry standard interfaces. However,
electronic data storage devices have many drawbacks, including that they are
costly to purchase, have limited lifetimes, require backup and recovery
systems, have a physical presence requiring specific environmental conditions,
require personnel to manage and consume considerable amounts of energy for both
power and cooling.
Cloud data
storage providers, such as AmazonS3, provide cheap, virtually unlimited
electronic data storage in remotely hosted facilities. Information stored with these providers is
accessible via the internet or Wide Area Network (WAN). Economies of scale enable providers to supply
data storage cheaper than the equivalent electronic data storage devices.
Cloud data
storage has many advantages. It’s cheap,
doesn’t require installation, doesn’t need replacing, has backup and recovery
systems, has no physical presence, requires no environmental conditions,
requires no personnel and doesn’t require energy for power or cooling. Cloud data storage however has several major
drawbacks, including performance, availability, incompatible interfaces and
lack of standards.
2.
Disadvantages of
Cloud Data Storage
Performance of
cloud data storage is limited by bandwidth.
Internet and WAN speeds are typically 10 to 100 times slower than LAN
speeds. For example, accessing a typical
file on a LAN takes 1 second, accessing the same file in cloud data storage may
take 10 to 100 seconds. While consumers
are used to slow internet downloads, they aren’t accustomed to waiting long
periods of time for a document or spreadsheet to load.
Availability of
cloud data storage is a serious issue.
Cloud data storage relies on network connectivity between the LAN and
the cloud data storage provider. Network
connectivity can be affected by any number of issues including global networks
disruptions, solar flares, severed underground cables and satellite damage. Cloud data storage has many more points of failure
and is not resilient to network outages.
Network outages mean the cloud data storage is completely unavailable.
Cloud data
storage providers use proprietary networking protocols often not compatible
with normal file serving on the LAN.
Accessing cloud data storage often involves ad hoc programs to be
created to bridge the difference in protocols.
The cloud data
storage industry doesn’t have a common set of standard protocols. This means that different interfaces need to
be created to access different cloud data storage providers. Swapping or choosing between providers is
complicated as their protocols are incompatible.
The cloud drive
data storage is small enough to be used on laptops while having enterprise
class features that enable it to be scaled out to the largest organization.
3.
Cloud Drive
Architecture
Cloud Drive is a
gateway to cloud storage. Cloud Drive
supports many cloud data storage providers including Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3,
Amazon EC2, Rackspace, EMC Atmos, Nirvanix, GoGrid, vcloud, Zetta, Scality,
Dunkel, Mezeo, Box.net, Webdav and FTP.
Cloud Drive hides the complexity of the underlying protocols allowing
you to deploy cloud storage as simply as deploying storage via an IP SAN.
Cloud Drive is
like an IP SAN that never runs out of space. As usage increases, Cloud Drive starts “offloading”
data to the cloud data provider. Cloud
Drive caches and optimizes traffic to/from cloud storage dramatically
increasing performance and availability while also reducing network traffic.
Computers on the
LAN access data via the block based iSCSI protocol. The storage service communicates via an
internet connection with the cloud data storage provider. When the iSCSI initiator saves data to the
data storage server, it initially stores the data in the local cache. Each data unit is uniquely located within the
local cache and is flagged as either “online” in the local cache or “offline”
in the cloud data storage provider. All
data units in the local cache are checked periodically for usage. Least recently used (or “dormant”) data units
are uploaded to the cloud data storage provider, flagged as “offline” and
deleted from the local cache.
4.
Cloud Drive Storage
Service
The cloud drive
storage service is simple to install and configure. It can be installed on a range of hardware,
from laptop for personal use, a server in the office, or a cluster of high end
64 bit servers for the enterprise. Once
the service in installed and configured, many clients can connect to it using
the iSCSI protocol.
The storage
service reduces the data storage requirements while maintaining performance by
moving the least recently used data to the cloud data storage provider as well
as one or more of the data storage accelerators. Cloud Drive accelerates performance by assuming
that actual writes to data can happen anytime before a subsequent read to the
same data. Cloud Drive accelerates performance
by scheduling this “delayed” write data to periods of low activity and by not
downloading data from the cloud data storage provider when the “delayed” write
data has wholly overwritten data stored in the cloud. Cloud Drive further accelerates performance
by assuming that delete operations can happen anytime after the data is downloaded.
Figure 1 – Upload data to Cloud
Storage
5.
Cloud Drive Optimizer
An optional
component, cloud drive optimizer, improves performance, reduces bandwidth and
reduces your data storage requirements.
The optimizer should be installed on all iSCSI clients using the cloud
drive storage service.
The data storage
optimizer has access to the virtual hard drive to optimize the data stored in
the local cache. The optimizer
periodically reads virtual hard drive or virtual file share metadata including
directories, filenames, permissions and attributes in order to maintain that
data in the local cache. In this way,
the data storage optimizer also accelerates performance of the data storage
server by preventing data other than file data from being identified as
“dormant”. The data storage optimizer
also reduces storage requirements of the data storage server by periodically
overwriting “all zeros” to unused parts of the virtual hard drive. The data storage optimizer is also adapted to
periodically run disk checking utilities against the virtual hard drive to
prevent important internal file systems data structures from being marked as
dormant.
6.
Cloud Drive Network
Accelerator
An optional
component, cloud drive network accelerator, improves the performance and
availability of the Storage Service.
This component can be installed on all computers in the home, office or
enterprise.
The network
accelerators allow the office to reclaim all those “small spaces” of data
storage already available on the 10’s, 100’s or 1000’s of computers within the
enterprise. A typical office with 100
computers having on average 100 GB of space available could potentially reclaim
100 x 100 GB = 10 TB of data storage space by reclaiming and consolidating this
unused space. Network accelerators boost performance and improve resilience to
slowness or unavailability of the cloud data storage providers by redundantly
storing data uploaded to the cloud data storage provider on the local network
in the already existing “unused spaces”
Network accelerators
work like a massive cache within the enterprise. In the above example, the Storage Services
local cache is complimented by a 10 TB onsite cache running throughout the
enterprise
7.
Cloud Drive Solution
Cloud Drive increases
the apparent availability of the cloud data storage provider. If the local cache satisfies 99% of requests
for data without requiring the cloud data storage provider, the apparent
availability of the cloud data storage provider is increased 100 fold and 99%
of data accesses occur at local network speeds rather than the network
connection speeds to the cloud data storage provider. Cloud Drive also manages the data formatting
and communication with the cloud data storage provider while allowing seamless
access to data using standard protocols such as iSCSI and NFS. Further, Cloud Drive allows concurrent
processing of read and writes requests to different data as well as
synchronized and serialized access to the same data.
Cloud Drive virtualizes
data storage by allowing a limited amount of physical data storage to appear
many times larger than it actually is. Cloud
Drive allows fast, expensive physical data storage to be supplemented by
cheaper, slower remote data storage without incurring substantial performance
degradation Cloud Drive also reduces the physical data storage requirements to a
small fraction of the total storage requirements, while the rest of the data
can be “offloaded” into slower, cheaper online cloud data storage providers.
Advantages And Disadvantages To Cloud Storage
It seems that everyone with a computer or mobile device spends a lot of time acquiring data and then trying to find a way to store it.
For some computer / mobile owners, finding enough storage space to hold all the data they’ve acquired is a real challenge. Some people invest in larger hard drives. Others prefer external storage devices like thumb drives or compact discs. Desperate few might delete entire folders worth of old files in order to make space for new information. But some are choosing to rely on a growing trend: cloud storage.
Cloud Storage: Cloud storage is the storage of your files and media on the “cloud”, i.e. someone else’s servers. There’s a few services that offer this, the most famous being Dropbox (2GB+ free storage), but there are other options such as Minus (10GB+ free storage) and Box.net (idk how much free storage) as well. Then there’s also specialized services such as Google Music and Amazon Music as well for, you guessed it, music.
There are a few advantages and disadvantages to cloud storage.
Advantages
- No need for extra hardware (i.e. SD card, thumb drive)
- Convenient
- Automatic synchronization
- Um, I’m sure you guys can think of more, I’m drawing a blank right now
Disadvantages
- Requires constant connection, either via data or wifi
- Potentially slow over 3G or weak Wifi
- Streaming movies is difficult, if not impossible (at least with Dropbox, etc.)
- Eats up a limited data plan quickly
While cloud storage sounds like it has something to do with weather fronts and storm systems, it really refers to saving data to an off-site storage system maintained by a third party. Instead of storing information to your computer’s hard drive or other local storage device, you save it to a remote database. The Internet provides the connection between your computer and the database.
On the surface, cloud storage has several advantages over traditional data storage. For example, if you store your data on a cloud storage system, you’ll be able to get to that data from any location that has Internet access. You wouldn’t need to carry around a physical storage device or use the same computer to save and retrieve your information. With the right storage system, you could even allow other people to access the data, turning a personal project into a collaborative effort.
So cloud storage is convenient and offers more flexibility, but how does it work? Share your experience with us through your comments.
Read more: http://www.bench3.org/tech/advantages-and-disadvantages-to-cloud-storage/#ixzz20ndi0pRM
Cloud Drive can be used for:
- Online backup and real-time protection of your data
- Syncing and collecting your data in one place
- Sharing documents, movies and photos
- Streaming music to you mobile devices
- Access to all your data in one place
- Mobile access on the go through apps for iPhone, iPad and Android phones
- Securing your data with encryption and password protection
- Recovering previous versions of files, even if you accidentally deleted them
This was last updated in August 2011
Posted by: Margaret Rouse
1.
Advantages of Cloud
Data Storage
Storing extremely
large volumes of information on a local area network (LAN) is expensive. High capacity electronic data storage devices
like file servers, Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS)
provide high performance, high availability data storage accessible via
industry standard interfaces. However,
electronic data storage devices have many drawbacks, including that they are
costly to purchase, have limited lifetimes, require backup and recovery
systems, have a physical presence requiring specific environmental conditions,
require personnel to manage and consume considerable amounts of energy for both
power and cooling.
Cloud data
storage providers, such as AmazonS3, provide cheap, virtually unlimited
electronic data storage in remotely hosted facilities. Information stored with these providers is
accessible via the internet or Wide Area Network (WAN). Economies of scale enable providers to supply
data storage cheaper than the equivalent electronic data storage devices.
Cloud data
storage has many advantages. It’s cheap,
doesn’t require installation, doesn’t need replacing, has backup and recovery
systems, has no physical presence, requires no environmental conditions,
requires no personnel and doesn’t require energy for power or cooling. Cloud data storage however has several major
drawbacks, including performance, availability, incompatible interfaces and
lack of standards.
2.
Disadvantages of
Cloud Data Storage
Performance of
cloud data storage is limited by bandwidth.
Internet and WAN speeds are typically 10 to 100 times slower than LAN
speeds. For example, accessing a typical
file on a LAN takes 1 second, accessing the same file in cloud data storage may
take 10 to 100 seconds. While consumers
are used to slow internet downloads, they aren’t accustomed to waiting long
periods of time for a document or spreadsheet to load.
Availability of
cloud data storage is a serious issue.
Cloud data storage relies on network connectivity between the LAN and
the cloud data storage provider. Network
connectivity can be affected by any number of issues including global networks
disruptions, solar flares, severed underground cables and satellite damage. Cloud data storage has many more points of failure
and is not resilient to network outages.
Network outages mean the cloud data storage is completely unavailable.
Cloud data
storage providers use proprietary networking protocols often not compatible
with normal file serving on the LAN.
Accessing cloud data storage often involves ad hoc programs to be
created to bridge the difference in protocols.
The cloud data
storage industry doesn’t have a common set of standard protocols. This means that different interfaces need to
be created to access different cloud data storage providers. Swapping or choosing between providers is
complicated as their protocols are incompatible.
The cloud drive
data storage is small enough to be used on laptops while having enterprise
class features that enable it to be scaled out to the largest organization.
3.
Cloud Drive
Architecture
Cloud Drive is a
gateway to cloud storage. Cloud Drive
supports many cloud data storage providers including Microsoft Azure, Amazon S3,
Amazon EC2, Rackspace, EMC Atmos, Nirvanix, GoGrid, vcloud, Zetta, Scality,
Dunkel, Mezeo, Box.net, Webdav and FTP.
Cloud Drive hides the complexity of the underlying protocols allowing
you to deploy cloud storage as simply as deploying storage via an IP SAN.
Cloud Drive is
like an IP SAN that never runs out of space. As usage increases, Cloud Drive starts “offloading”
data to the cloud data provider. Cloud
Drive caches and optimizes traffic to/from cloud storage dramatically
increasing performance and availability while also reducing network traffic.
Computers on the
LAN access data via the block based iSCSI protocol. The storage service communicates via an
internet connection with the cloud data storage provider. When the iSCSI initiator saves data to the
data storage server, it initially stores the data in the local cache. Each data unit is uniquely located within the
local cache and is flagged as either “online” in the local cache or “offline”
in the cloud data storage provider. All
data units in the local cache are checked periodically for usage. Least recently used (or “dormant”) data units
are uploaded to the cloud data storage provider, flagged as “offline” and
deleted from the local cache.
4.
Cloud Drive Storage
Service
The cloud drive
storage service is simple to install and configure. It can be installed on a range of hardware,
from laptop for personal use, a server in the office, or a cluster of high end
64 bit servers for the enterprise. Once
the service in installed and configured, many clients can connect to it using
the iSCSI protocol.
The storage
service reduces the data storage requirements while maintaining performance by
moving the least recently used data to the cloud data storage provider as well
as one or more of the data storage accelerators. Cloud Drive accelerates performance by assuming
that actual writes to data can happen anytime before a subsequent read to the
same data. Cloud Drive accelerates performance
by scheduling this “delayed” write data to periods of low activity and by not
downloading data from the cloud data storage provider when the “delayed” write
data has wholly overwritten data stored in the cloud. Cloud Drive further accelerates performance
by assuming that delete operations can happen anytime after the data is downloaded.
Figure 1 – Upload data to Cloud
Storage
5.
Cloud Drive Optimizer
An optional
component, cloud drive optimizer, improves performance, reduces bandwidth and
reduces your data storage requirements.
The optimizer should be installed on all iSCSI clients using the cloud
drive storage service.
The data storage
optimizer has access to the virtual hard drive to optimize the data stored in
the local cache. The optimizer
periodically reads virtual hard drive or virtual file share metadata including
directories, filenames, permissions and attributes in order to maintain that
data in the local cache. In this way,
the data storage optimizer also accelerates performance of the data storage
server by preventing data other than file data from being identified as
“dormant”. The data storage optimizer
also reduces storage requirements of the data storage server by periodically
overwriting “all zeros” to unused parts of the virtual hard drive. The data storage optimizer is also adapted to
periodically run disk checking utilities against the virtual hard drive to
prevent important internal file systems data structures from being marked as
dormant.
6.
Cloud Drive Network
Accelerator
An optional
component, cloud drive network accelerator, improves the performance and
availability of the Storage Service.
This component can be installed on all computers in the home, office or
enterprise.
The network
accelerators allow the office to reclaim all those “small spaces” of data
storage already available on the 10’s, 100’s or 1000’s of computers within the
enterprise. A typical office with 100
computers having on average 100 GB of space available could potentially reclaim
100 x 100 GB = 10 TB of data storage space by reclaiming and consolidating this
unused space. Network accelerators boost performance and improve resilience to
slowness or unavailability of the cloud data storage providers by redundantly
storing data uploaded to the cloud data storage provider on the local network
in the already existing “unused spaces”
Network accelerators
work like a massive cache within the enterprise. In the above example, the Storage Services
local cache is complimented by a 10 TB onsite cache running throughout the
enterprise
7.
Cloud Drive Solution
Cloud Drive increases
the apparent availability of the cloud data storage provider. If the local cache satisfies 99% of requests
for data without requiring the cloud data storage provider, the apparent
availability of the cloud data storage provider is increased 100 fold and 99%
of data accesses occur at local network speeds rather than the network
connection speeds to the cloud data storage provider. Cloud Drive also manages the data formatting
and communication with the cloud data storage provider while allowing seamless
access to data using standard protocols such as iSCSI and NFS. Further, Cloud Drive allows concurrent
processing of read and writes requests to different data as well as
synchronized and serialized access to the same data.
Cloud Drive virtualizes
data storage by allowing a limited amount of physical data storage to appear
many times larger than it actually is. Cloud
Drive allows fast, expensive physical data storage to be supplemented by
cheaper, slower remote data storage without incurring substantial performance
degradation Cloud Drive also reduces the physical data storage requirements to a
small fraction of the total storage requirements, while the rest of the data
can be “offloaded” into slower, cheaper online cloud data storage providers.
Advantages And Disadvantages To Cloud Storage
It seems that everyone with a computer or mobile device spends a lot of time acquiring data and then trying to find a way to store it.
For some computer / mobile owners, finding enough storage space to hold all the data they’ve acquired is a real challenge. Some people invest in larger hard drives. Others prefer external storage devices like thumb drives or compact discs. Desperate few might delete entire folders worth of old files in order to make space for new information. But some are choosing to rely on a growing trend: cloud storage.
Cloud Storage: Cloud storage is the storage of your files and media on the “cloud”, i.e. someone else’s servers. There’s a few services that offer this, the most famous being Dropbox (2GB+ free storage), but there are other options such as Minus (10GB+ free storage) and Box.net (idk how much free storage) as well. Then there’s also specialized services such as Google Music and Amazon Music as well for, you guessed it, music.
There are a few advantages and disadvantages to cloud storage.
Advantages
- No need for extra hardware (i.e. SD card, thumb drive)
- Convenient
- Automatic synchronization
- Um, I’m sure you guys can think of more, I’m drawing a blank right now
Disadvantages
- Requires constant connection, either via data or wifi
- Potentially slow over 3G or weak Wifi
- Streaming movies is difficult, if not impossible (at least with Dropbox, etc.)
- Eats up a limited data plan quickly
While cloud storage sounds like it has something to do with weather fronts and storm systems, it really refers to saving data to an off-site storage system maintained by a third party. Instead of storing information to your computer’s hard drive or other local storage device, you save it to a remote database. The Internet provides the connection between your computer and the database.
On the surface, cloud storage has several advantages over traditional data storage. For example, if you store your data on a cloud storage system, you’ll be able to get to that data from any location that has Internet access. You wouldn’t need to carry around a physical storage device or use the same computer to save and retrieve your information. With the right storage system, you could even allow other people to access the data, turning a personal project into a collaborative effort.
So cloud storage is convenient and offers more flexibility, but how does it work? Share your experience with us through your comments.
Read more: http://www.bench3.org/tech/advantages-and-disadvantages-to-cloud-storage/#ixzz20ndi0pRM
Cloud Drive can be used for:
- Online backup and real-time protection of your data
- Syncing and collecting your data in one place
- Sharing documents, movies and photos
- Streaming music to you mobile devices
- Access to all your data in one place
- Mobile access on the go through apps for iPhone, iPad and Android phones
- Securing your data with encryption and password protection
- Recovering previous versions of files, even if you accidentally deleted them
At the time of writing this post that amount is 2GB. You can get up to 18GB of storage for free if you invite a lot of people to use Dropbox. application migration to cloud
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