Gaberluzie got intrigued by the idea of Cloud vaults, they sound much more clankingly satisfying than simple, drat where is it datastorage!! All triggered by a story in The Register  on CommVault adding a cloud connector to its Simpana archiving package so customers can now archive data to disk or to various 'cloud' vaults. Simpana being a data protection and management software suite that can store deduplicated data on tape, in drive arrays and now in the cloud, in what it calls "far line" storage.

Straightforward to use and as far as the archiving of files, databases and messaging application data is concerned nothing changes. A wizard is used to create a Cloud Disk Library shared between one or more CommVault media agents.

Customer data is hoovered into the Simpana vault exactly as before, with a different destination. The Simpana manager can specify several cloud addresses: Amazon's S3, EMC's Atmos (soon), Iron Mountain, Microsoft's Azure and the Nirvanix SDN cloud.

Customers need a service contract with the cloud service supplier before using the CommVault connector. This connector uses a REST/HTTP interface. Data going to the cloud is indexed, de-duplicated and encrypted before transmission, to preserve searchability and security and reduce network bandwidth needed.

CommVault reckons the cloud can be used to augment or replace a tape infrastructure, reduce data centre storage use by putting archive data into a cloud library, and to provide backup for remote offices.

Seagate's i365 service recently had a cloud connector added but to CA and C2C clouds, not the Simpana destinations.  Existing and new CommVault customers can deploy a cloud disk library immediately, or as soon as they get a service contract with a connected cloud service supplier. The new cloud connector is included in the CommVault per-TB disk licence, with pricing starting at $900 per TB CommVault software licence.

Does IT resemble reality?
There are three types of cloud: stratos, cumulus and cirrus? Wrong. There are 1o categories of clouds and 27 subtypes divided by height, shape, colour and associated weather. The USPS stamp sheet, however excluded the tenth type nimbo stratus because it is the large, dark uniform gray sky we know so well.

It looks as if Cloud computing might be rapidly developing into just such a similar complication. Thanks to ResearchBuzz which has recently pointed out the existance of a CloudBook that claims over 1200 cloud solutions indexed into an Interactive Taxonomy menu so you can compare Application (SaaS), Platform (PaaS) and Infrastructure (IaaS) products to find the right solution for your business.

Do not click page links however, they are dead ends ..keep to the top left hand menu for Cloud Group, Government Clouds, Research Clouds and even What is Cloud Computing (actually, that's a seven video collection in which IBM's Seamus McManus: Beekeeper immediately took Gaberlunzie's attention.

You can sort products & services by functionality using the interactive taxonomy menu or use the alphabetical menu to sort by company. More work needed to discover if the geographies for these Clouds is also given.

As Gaberlunzie and his editor are locked in an ignorant battle as to whether the Cloud crowd have yet got round to offering say the graphics design community the sort of facilities that say Google offers to the average writer/secretary with its willingness to open a document 'up there' and let you edit it, save it there and refer it to someone elsewhere, and with neither of us knowing the answer, Gaberlunzie tried a shot at graphics and design in the search.

It scored three entries:
XDR2 - By Rambus, Inc
Compute & Storage: Physical Cloud Resources. The XDR2 memory architecture is the world's fastest memory system solution. Designed for scalability, power efficiency and manufacturability, the XDR2 architecture is a complete memory solution ideally suited for high-performance gaming, graphics and multi-core compute applications.

Now that does look relevant, but not the two contributor profiles also listed as their resumes happen to mention the  word 'graphics.'   Alas the Cloudbook is clearly not into design.

However, the software is coming through as PartBrowser for CAD searching appears to be offered on a free trial at its EMEA distributor "The fast and easy way to find the part you created and just can not remember its file number." says Tom Angus, of Devro (Scotland) Ltd.

Still the CloudBook its a nice sort of resource and currently firmly anchored around “Cloud”, (right) Timothy Chou’s second book on the software industrythat  is based on a series of lectures at Stanford University which discusses cloud computing from a business perspective.

"Today, as the software industry undergoes a major transformation to an on-demand model, it’s important to understand the seven potential business models before deciding if they are a Vice or a Virtue.

"You will hear some say, “We can’t move to a software on demand model, the sales guys will never be able to sell it,” while others will talk endlessly about the virtues of the on-demand model and how, “It’ll be great to not have to wonder if this quarter we’ll close that big deal at midnight on December 31.” Some companies operate in only one model; others have products that operate in multiple models.

"To add some concreteness to the examples, we’ll start from the perspective of a traditional enterprise software model"



It's a diagram that may need a bit of updating in light of the latest from Microsoft.  One of the more interesting models to make news is that the National Science Foundation and the Microsoft Corporation have agreed to offer American scientific researchers free access to the company’s new cloud computing service. Three-year project will give scientists the computing power to cope with exploding amounts of research data.

It uses Microsoft’s Windows Azure computing system, which the company recently introduced to compete with cloud computing services from Amazon, Google, I.B.M. and Yahoo. These cloud computing systems allow individuals and organisations to run computing tasks and Internet services remotely in relatively low-cost data centers.

Millions of dollars would be invested in the service and that could support thousands of scientific research programs. Access will come in grants from the foundation to new and continuing scientific research. Microsoft executives said they planned eventually to make the new service global.

“It’s all about data,” said Jeannette M. Wing, (left) assistant director of computer and information science and engineering directorate at the science foundation. “We are generating streams and rivers of data.”

Genetic sequencing systems are capable of generating as much as a terabyte, 1,000 gigabytes, of information a minute, Dr. Wing said.

Programming modern cloud systems for full efficiency has been difficult. The company is trying to overcome this difficulty in creating a variety of software tools for scientists, said Dr Ed Lazowska, (right) a University of Washington computer scientist who works with the Microsoft researchers.

Dr. Lazowska says the explosion of data being collected by scientists has transformed the staffing needs of the typical scientific research program on campus, from a half-time graduate student one day a week, to a full-time employee dedicated to managing the data. He said such exponential growth in cost was increasingly hampering scientific research.

The answer could indeed lie in the clouds.