Beyond Online Storage

摘要

Businesses don't generate their own electricity, and Nirvanix CEO Patrick Harr argues they shouldn't have to provide their own storage, either. A storage system in the cloud can be used as a utility, he says. "You can scale on demand. You don't have to worry about disks going bad, about maintenance." Nirvanix is different from online backup services; its Storage Delivery Network is built on a proprietary virtu -alized file system, Harr says. In a typical online storage offering, a customer's application writes to a namespace associated with a physical system. If that system changes, the app has to write to a new target. By contrast, SDN appears to applications as one drive, when in fact data may be written across multiple drives in different locations. When applications call on data stored in the cloud, Nirvanix can deliver it from the closest data center, improving response time. Customers also can add storage on the fly without having to change the address an application uses.