How Does Cloud Computing Work In Business?

We hear a lot about “the cloud” these days. Just what is the cloud and how does it help you do business better, faster and cheaper? Let’s have a look.

Usually when we say that business is cloudy, it’s not a good thing. Cloudy implies fuzzy and unpredictable. Wouldn’t you rather have clear and predictable instead? Financially speaking, of course you would. This is why people cock an eyebrow when somebody says you need to go off to the cloud somewhere.

You know, this is really a problem of semantics more than anything. When we talk about cloud computing, cloud storage or cloud networking, we’re not talking about dealing with fuzzy logic, quantum mechanics or anything else that you can’t quite nail down. The “cloud” with respect to IT and telecommunications services is quite determinate. The metaphor of the cloud is more about not having to be personally concerned about the details of how something is being accomplished rather than once you turn your back it’s a free for all.

Let’s take cloud storage for instance. This is becoming the most popular cloud service because it works for both business and non-business users. Everybody has data. Today most of that data is spinning on hard drives in personal computers. Some of it is stored in solid state memory chips inside tablets and smartphones. There are two services that the cloud can provide your data. First, it can safely store a copy in case disaster strikes and your hard drive crashes or you leave your laptop or smartphone in a taxi. If nothing else, there are thousands of personal photographs or client records amassed over the course of years that won’t disappear forever in an instant.

Second, the cloud can provide a central repository that you can access from whatever device you have at the moment and from wherever you happen to be. Sure, there are remote access programs that let you reach into your PC from across town. That assumes that you leave your computer on all the time and that a specialized client is available that will work on all devices for all types of data. It’s not quite the same as going to the online cloud “warehouse” to fetch a copy of whatever. In fact, it is getting to the point where you don’t have to fetch at all. All of your devices can sync with the cloud so that they either have a copy of the file locally or it appears to the user that they do.

Cloud storage as automatic backup makes sense because we all pretty much suck at remembering to backup files ourselves. You can improve this a bit by adding an external disk drive with a program like Apple’s Time Machine to automatically make copies whether you are paying attention or not. Still, if your house or office burns down you lose everything in the ash heap of melted hard drives.

The cloud gets away from the problem of having everything in one place where it can be destroyed all at once by keeping a copy hundreds or thousands of miles away. But the cloud also backs up its own data. Remember that the cloud is not some vaporous collection of neurons in the sky. It is realized as a secure data center with racks and racks full of hardware. That’s hardware that can fail just as surely as your desktop PC or local server. Cloud providers need RAID and other protections for disk data along with battery and generator backup power to ensure that those files will be there when you call for them.

The business model behind the cloud is that very large data centers operated by dedicated service providers who specialize in cloud services can give hundreds, thousands or millions of clients all the disk storage, servers and bandwidth that they could possibly use at a lower cost than having each and every client replicate that data center on a smaller basis.

The secret to a successful cloud is virtualization. This is a technique where a fixed pool of hardware resources is sliced and diced so that it can be apportioned to customers as needed. The virtualization software makes it appear to each customer that they are in control of 1 or 100 or 1,000 separate servers and Terabytes worth of disk drives. In actuality, there are fewer actual hardware servers than there are virtual servers because few applications need to hog a whole server to themselves. Sometimes, however, a virtual server will encompass more than one physical server because it really, really needs that much power. It doesn’t matter to the application, the client or the cloud whether a particular server is physical or virtual. The job gets done and the client gets billed by the capacity used.

One specialized cloud service is hosted VoIP, also called hosted PBX or hosted voice. This is a telephone switching system that handles your internal and external phone calls exactly as the most modern in-house PBX system would. The difference is that all you have in the building are phone sets and a SIP Trunk connecting your network to the service provider. Like cloud computing and storage, you pay for what you use and never have to make a capital investment. When you need more, you simply order more and you have it in a flash.

Does the idea of the cloud make more sense as a resource and potential cost saver over what you are doing now? If so, get more information on cloud computing and communications services and compare prices with doing everything yourself. That should definitely make things a lot clearer.

Build Your Own Private Cloud Storage

Many small and medium businesses are doing at least some storage in the public cloud, especially with disaster recovery in mind. But you still need at least some storage locally. You can go with a SAN (Storage Attached Network) that is expensive and complicated or you can consider something much easier and simpler.

That something is a Drobo storage system. Drobo, which sounds like a good name for a robot, is a deceptively advanced hard disk storage solution that uses standard 3.5” SATA disk drives of pretty much any capacity. The deceptive part is that this appears to be just some simple multi-bay drive case. You can plug in more drives at any time. You can pull drives out at any time. You can even pull out a 1 TB drive and replace it with a 2 TB drive at any time.

Sounds convenient, but what kind of administrative nightmare lies behind swapping all those drives in and out. None at all. It’s truly plug and play... or I should say plug and store. You don’t have to log into any admin panel and start typing arcane command lines to make things work. All of that is automated and invisible to you, the user.

You are, indeed, building your own private storage cloud and it stays on your premises. There’s no worry about having sufficient bandwidth to access data in real-time because this unit sits on a desk or mounts in a rack and connects to your local network.

You are no doubt familiar with RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives), a technique of interconnecting multiple hard drives so that the failure of one drive will not cause you to lose data. Drobo’s system goes even farther. They call it BeyondRAID. The difference is that with Drobo you can use drives of any size and they don’t have to be the same. Grab half a dozen SATA drives at random and plug them into the Drobo box. The system automatically sets them up for redundant storage with the combined capacity being your storage pool. It’s not a matter of the smallest disk defining the storage pool or virtual hot spare.

You can see how this is similar to the cloud philosophy in that you don’t need to be concerned about the mechanics of how to get all those disparate disk drives to work in harmony. That’s built into the operating system. If you start to run out of room, just plug another drive into an empty bay. Oh, your bays are all full? OK. Just yank out the smallest drive and replace it with a larger one. The system will automatically accommodate the drive change, give you the extra capacity and not lose any information in the process.

You can even upgrade the drive system at will. Move up from a 9 bay system to a 12 bay system for up to 24 TB of local storage. Pull your drive out of the old case and plug them into the new one. Oh, oh. You forgot which drive was in which slot? No problem. Just plug them into any open slot, include any new ones wherever there is room and you are good to go. The status lights will all light green when the system has sorted things out and is ready to use.

Does this sound a bit too simple to be true? Well, you’ll just have to read the material and watch the demonstration videos to see for yourself. Drobo units start at just 4 bays for small office use (with however many drives you care to plug in) and go up from there.

Note: Photo of open hard disk drive courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Drobo Mr. Storage Roboto

What gets sucked up faster than excess bandwidth? Disk drive space, that's what. If all you did was word processing and spreadsheets, one of those 150 GB drives would last forever. But with digital cameras saving multi-Megabits per picture and videos making still photos look puny, there's no such thing as too much disk.

Replacing a disk drive with a bigger one or even adding more drives has its own challenges. The more Gigabytes you have, the more you have to backup or risk losing it all to a fatal head crash. If graphic design or video production is your occupation, you can spend substantial amounts of time protecting your work from untimely loss. What you need is an assistant to take of that. if fact, what you could really use is a personal robot.

Well, here's your robot. It's called Drobo, the "world's first storage robot." Drobo is a self-contained black cube of electronics with 4 open slots for SATA drives. You plug 'em in and Drobo takes care of disk management.

It almost looks like a hard drive juke box. But Drobo is a lot more sophisticated than that. It not only combines storage capacity from multiple drives, it secures your data from hardware failure. How does it do that?

At this point, I can imagine a legion of terrified insects all screaming "RAID". Funny, but not it. RAID or Redundant Array of Inexpensive or Independent Disks, is a technique of spreading data across several disk drives instead of concentrating it on a single drive. Files are not only spread over several disks, but redundant information is also written so that the file can be recovered if one of the drives crashes.

Drobo does something similar called SAFE for Secure, Automated, Flexible, Expandable. An advantage over RAID systems is that you can mix drives of various capacities and Drobo doesn't care. It works with whatever capacities you plug in. Like RAID, if a drive "goes south" you don't lose your data. A red light comes on and you pull out the bad drive and plug in a new one. You don't even have to fill the four slots. Start out with one or two drives and add more as you need them. Blue lights on the box tell you how much capacity you've used up.

Like any redundant storage system, Drobo uses substantial amounts of your disk drives for redundant data protection. A combination of drives that add up to 1.5 TB give you 929 GB of actual storage. That could easily be worth it as the robot does all the work.

Data Robotics put a lot of effort into making Drobo behave as much like an independent robot as possible. You don't have to worry about configuring anything or managing the processes. You plug it in, connect to a USB port, add some drives and away you go. When the drives are ready, Drobo lights green indicators next to them. Somewhere in its robotic brain, Drobo is keeping track of drive health and making sure that you don't lose anything. If you notice a flashing red light, replace that drive. It's a goner.

Drobo works with PCs and MACs through a USB port, or you can buy the optional Droboshare accessory that turns it into networked storage over a 10/100/1000 Ethernet connection. Find out more about the Drobo Fully Automated SATA Robotic Storage Array 4 Bay USB 2.0 and read the user reviews to see if this product is right for you.