1.1 Understanding Cloud Integrated Storage

A lot of our OES customers deal with huge storage (greater than TB) of data that is stored in the OES servers. As time grows, the data keeps increasing adding to the storage and maintenance cost. In the past few years, an object store or cloud has become very popular as a storage solution as it provides scalable storage and deployment with the total cost of ownership often being much less.

As the enterprise data continues to grow, the cold or inactive data keeps increasing and fills up the primary or expensive storage. This results in less space for hot or active data. Instead, you can move the cold data to cloud storage using pre-defined policies.

Keeping this in mind, we asked ourself how can we help our users take advantage of the benefits of an object store or cloud storage through OES and decided to offer a solution called Cloud Integrated Storage (CIS). CIS allows you to move and provision the enterprise data from the OES servers to object store or cloud storage by using pre-defined policies.

Cloud Integrated Storage Overview

The three main objectives of CIS are:

  • Analyze: A single view of data available across your organization. CIS performs adaptive scanning of the data on the OES servers and provides meaningful information such as:

    • Percentage of hot and cold data available based on the access time and modified time

    • Volumes with more cold data

    • Top file types available as part of cold data

    This information helps you to decide on how to manage the data effectively.

  • Migrate: Based on your organizational needs, CIS helps you to create rich policies to decide what kind of data to be migrated. It offloads the cold data from highly expensive storage to much cheaper cloud storage while users still continue to seamlessly access the files.

  • Report: Provides a rich dashboard to view the trends around the data movement. Generate reports on data migration and recall and also provides a graphical representation of the same for better understanding. You get to explicitly see how the data is moving within your organization.

Use the CIS Management console to perform the following major tasks:

  • Configure your server

    • Configure cloud account, policies, and tiers

    • Create and manage roles for other users

    • Configure CIS and agents settings

  • Monitor and manage your server’s health

    • Overall status of the server

    • Monitor the status of individual services in the CIS server

  • Data migration solution for DST volumes

  • Securely transfer the data to the cloud using AES encryption

Cloud Integrated Storage is a network service that manages the data intelligently and reduces the total cost of ownership while improving flexibility.

The following video provides an introduction to Cloud Integrated Storage (CIS):