posted on Monday, August 30, 2010 3:38 PM
A RANGE OF OPTIONS
Almost exactly a year ago, I inherited several sets of model railroad trains. Two full O scale sets and two full HO scale sets. They were in varying stages of disrepair, and I wasn’t certain any of them worked. I’m not a train person, but my kids might be – given the chance to try them out. So I took them all to different dealers (who would have thought that different people work on different scales?), and had them all looked at to determine which one was most in need of fixing. It turned out that a diesel O scale was the easiest of the five engines to fix, so The Toddler and I dropped it off this spring.
A few weeks ago, the train was ready for us to pick up, but while there I discovered the expense that toddler-proof tracks incur, and The Toddler showed his proclivity for big black coal engines by insisting that the diesel engines weren’t part of a train at all. So I looked about, picked a train set that included all of the cars listed in the golden book The Little Red Caboose, track, and a transformer. My single inherited transformer was very old, and I didn’t trust it.
This way we had a working black engine, a train that met toddler expectations, and something any of the children that wished to stop and play with could take for a spin. I dug out a sheet of pink Styrofoam insulation that was left from some wargaming terrain I built, and we had a track…
Yesterday, after the two boys and I had spent quite a bit of time making the train go around the track, The Toddler grabbed my grandfathers’ engine and wanted to run it around the track. Both are O scale, but I had been told the engine would require work. Even so, I said “Sure, let’s give it a try!” and put the train on the tracks. Guess what? This 80 year old engine fired up and ran like gangbusters. It is noisy as all get-out and doesn’t have the bells and whistles that the new engine does, but I already had it when I bought the new train.
And yeah, that’s a bit embarrassing to admit. I bought an entire train set when it is entirely possible all I needed was a transformer. Granted, both the 23 year old and the 2 year old enjoy the new train, so it’s not a waste of money, but they’d have enjoyed this old monster too, had I tried it out first. The thing is, I was uncertain of the old one and thought new would work better for my purposes.
WHY YES, THIS IS ABOUT CLOUD STORAGE
That’s where cloud storage is right now. Cloud storage providers are not offering you storage with the same old CIFS or NFS interface you are accustomed to. Sure, if you’re writing a web application you can store your data to the cloud storage through their APIs, but those APIs are not standardized in any way, and certainly ignore what we’re used to dealing with.
You have essentially the same choice as me. Try out the shiny new and see what works and doesn’t, or use the old and see if it works. Thankfully, there are Cloud Storage Gateway vendors that let you use the old style and take advantage of the new – much like if I had bought that transformer and tried the train out.
I do not generally shrink back from writing code where it is useful, but it seems to me that writing code to interface to a cloud storage vendor is wasting your precious dev time. It would be a fun exercise, but if the application moves anywhere – if you want to shift your storage location for performance or cost or uptime reasons – you’re going to have to rewrite all of that code. That’s pretty fragile, and I do shirk away from building fragile systems.
KEEP THE GOOD, USE THE NEW
You already have a storage mechanism, the APIs used from every programming language under the sun are well tested to work with it, and it is well known to all of your developers. It’s called CIFS (or NFS, depending upon your shop and the application in question). While we can speed your XML calls to cloud storage vendors through LTM or WOM, we can also virtualize your storage mechanism with ARX. Meanwhile, a Cloud Storage Gateway can worry about interfacing with multiple cloud vendors and your applications don’t have to know about a particular cloud storage vendor’s implementation… They can use standard file read-write calls to disk mounted in the old-fashioned manner. Think of it like the transformer (because change is what they do after all) between you and your cloud storage. You get industry standard development, while taking advantage of the newest storage mechanism on the planet and a pay-as-you-go model.
The problem, as I see it, is one of vendor lock-in and increasing complexity. You are going to have a more complex environment with cloud in place – at least for the next few years, perhaps for ever. One place you can reduce complexity is letting these specialist devices do the translation, and allowing your application developers to continue to use tried-n-true file storage mechanisms, reducing the complexity of your code and increasing the chances that you can move off of your current cloud storage vendor when the need arises. A huge side benefit is that your replication and backup applications – and other purchased applications – can access that cloud storage directly as if it was drives on the LAN. This makes cloud storage more useful to IT in general, and added to the ability to keep writing your applications as you always have decreases the time to make use of cloud storage and increases the uses you can put it to.
Do we here at F5 think we could add to your value by inserting an ARX in front of the Cloud Storage Gateway? Of course we do, but you don’t need ARX to take advantage of Cloud Storage Gateways today. Pick a vendor, there are quite a few, and do a test run. Find out if they’re what you need to jump start your use of cloud storage. If my years in IT have any value, then they will be just what you’ve been looking for.
I know that I’d have been pleased if I’d just bought a transformer, but the advice I was given was the opposite of the advice I’m offering you – they told me to go with all new, I’m telling you to take advantage of the good new stuff and otherwise use what you know works.
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