Hybrid Cloud Gatewayâs: Your Avenue to Infiniteness-Part One
Itâs no surprise the biggest hindrance to cloud storage adoption is the lack of standards. Cloud storage providerâs talk via REST and SOAP API interfaces. Your data, however, is accessed via data center protocols, ie FC, iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, FCoE. Bringing the two together is as foggy as the Scottish lochs. Ideally to leverage the power of cloud storage, your ingest point has to be in one of three ways.
Specialized code that can talk to the cloud providers via these REST/SOAP APIs
Application integration via platforms such as VMware vFabric (based on spring)
Cloud gateways, seem to be the least impacting of all these ingest points..
So what is a Cloud Gateway?
Simply put itâs an appliance (physical commodity hardware) OR a virtual construct that consumes data on the front end using standard Ethernet interfaces/DC protocols and moves it to a cloud storage provider on the backend via Cloud APIs. Cloud gateways operate similarly to Storage Arrays and funny enough offer up some compelling features such asâŚ
Housed within the appliance are caching mechanisms as well as local storage (SAS or EFDâs typically, in the TB range for best of breed solutions) that ease and quicken the retrieval of hot data. However cold data that meets specific policies is tiered to a cloud provider of your choice. Those policies could include, last access time, last modify time, number of snapshots, etc.
Next we will focus on how Cloud Gateways will accelerate your journey to âcloudâ and how it could potentially fit into your organization⌠  Â