Cloudlake Hybrid

Whilst “Cloud First” is a term being adopted across the industry, Autodata believes in “Cloud Right”. Some services are ideal for traditional cloud adoption (e.g. M365, SaaS, BUaaS etc) whereas others are expensive, slow and difficult to manage in this environment.

What you really require is the ability to choose the right location for the right data at the right price, simply and conveniently, with the ability to tier from on-premise storage to cloud storage and back to on-premise, depending on the business need at any point in time.

Enter Cloudlake^® Hybrid – where Hybrid truly means Hybrid … not just a static silo of workloads within the Cloud and a static silo on-premise, but a truly-connected infrastructure where the Cloud becomes one with your on-premise hardware and is used as a natural extension of your infrastructure.

A key example of data perfectly placed to move to the cloud is unstructured data.

Unstructured data typically represents 70% of all data stored by an organisation and of this data 70-80% has not been accessed in the last 12 months.

So why keep this data on-site? Reasons normally revolve around:

• How do we identify what data can be moved?
• What if we need to access it again?
• We don’t want to change our workflow for data access
• How can I forecast my costs?

Cloudlake Hybrid mitigates all of these issues seamlessly enabling “Hybrid” to be integrated into any environment.

1 – ANALYSIS

Understanding what data would be suitable for migration can be complex, extremely time consuming and sometimes impossible; often a cloud migration or hybrid implementation can stall or fail at this stage. Autodata created our Cloudlake Analytics tool entirely for this task.

We run our Cloudlake Analytics engine against your storage repositories and feedback on the age of data, when it was last accessed/modified, how much data you have, what the cost of migration would look like in the future (over multiple years) and how much money could be saved.

We then provide this information to you in a simple customised PDF report which can help you easily justify the benefit of implementing Cloudlake Hybrid to your internal business leaders.

2 – INTEGRATION

Cloudlake Hybrid integrates seamlessly with your environment so there is no need to change workflow or re-train staff. Storage repositories will look and feel the same so if a user normally stores files in a location on your file server, they will still look like they are there, this is achieved by a process of “stubbing”.

A stub will look like a file (same filename, same file extension, same location) but will actually be a link to the cloud repository storing the original file. When a user selects this file on the local storage array it will automatically be retrieved from the cloud location, if they continue to work on this file it will then be saved back on the local system.

3 – STORAGE CONTROL

Cloudlake Hybrid gives our clients control over when data is replicated to the cloud and when it is “stubbed” on-premise independently of each other. An organisation may want to replicate every file that is created to the cloud (for additional protection from accidental deletions, malicious events etc) or only once data reaches a certain age (for space reclamation) which can be variable by the location of the original file and by a time period of choosing.

Clients then choose when they wish to reclaim the space on the original on-premise storage. This can be as soon as it’s within the cloud location, or at a future date, or based on the capacity of the on-premise storage.

4 – COST CONTROL

Cloudlake Hybrid is charged purely on the amount of storage in the cloud repository. There is no charge for management, ingress, egress or API fees. As such, combined with Cloudlake Analytics, the costs are easy to predict with no surprises. Cloudlake Hybrid is charged at £7.99 per TB per month.

THE TIME HAS ARRIVED!

By fully integrating the cloud tier with on-premise storage, you are able to scale out data to the cloud that doesn’t require a high IOPS, low latency connection on-premise but still maintain access to use and store these files natively within the same SAN/NAS/DAS environment you currently use, or implement new hardware and software to further reduce costs.

Moving to the cloud can look expensive, hence why it’s always advised to look at the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) including all the “Soft Costs” (power, cooling, management, warranties, etc) as well as “Hard Costs” (physical infrastructure and on-premise software and/or cloud storage and compute costs per month). With our right-sizing strategy, Hard Costs are typically reduced by 50%+ and Soft Costs by 80%.

Get Cloud right with Cloudlake Hybrid. Not only does it provide an increase in performance, security, manageability, reliability and functionality, but a reduction in price across the board too.

Cloudlake^® is a registered trademark of Autodata Products Limited.