FedEx to the rescue?
WAN Acceleration needed for external Clouds, internal cloud gaining movement.
By Larry Chaffin 
Amazon is working with customers to help with terabits of data that need to go to storage in their cloud by offering a service which makes no sense to me. Let’s you have terabytes of data you need to upload to Amazon’s cloud storage service. Your company does not feel like waiting the transfer to complete over hours or days, maybe weeks, you now have another option, FedEx. Amazon is allowing customers to FedEx mass storage devices to its Seattle, Virginia or Dublin locations for direct and internal upload. Amazon will charge your company $80 per physical storage device sent, plus $2.49 for each hour it takes for the data to upload.
From Amazon “AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity. AWS is not responsible for damages associated with loss or inadvertent disclosure of data; or the loss, damage, or destruction of the physical hardware. You should always retain a back-up copy of your data.”
Why would you have cloud storage if you need to use FedEx to get data to Amazon? This is one of the main reasons cloud storage needs to allow customers to put their own WAN Acceleration appliance in to help with the movement of data. Now most cloud providers are not allowing this and causing issues with sales for customers. Now customers are looking at more of an internal cloud. I have been working with more than a few worldwide customers who are looking at the internal cloud for this reason and the security of an internal cloud. They would only look at Amazon or others if they could put a WAN Acceleration appliance in their data center of which Amazon tells customer no. Plus if you already have invested in storage it makes no sense to go external at the moment.
So who is going to win and lose in the cloud?
The winner of cloud storage won’t be Amazon or other big companies but the smaller or regional company who will work with customers, allow them to use WAN Acceleration. If I had my own data center I would offer it to customers, it would be hardware based at the customer site. They could accelerate all traffic back to the cloud or the data center for storage and cloud applications. Cloud Storage vendors selling customer more bandwidth will not work and does not work, that’s why they are using FedEx now.
The losers are the customers right now, it is not good to say that but it is the truth. Customers have been sold an idea that by moving to the cloud things are so much faster and better, well they are not. Most of the time they are slower and now FedEx is coming to the rescue of Amazon. I say build your own internal cloud and use an external cloud only if you can get the same speed, storage and application performance. You will need WAN Acceleration for your external cloud, so look for help. Feel free to drop me a comment if you need ideas.
