What do the laws of physics, economics, and the land have in common? Hybrid cloud, object storage, and LucidLink.
In an article from Wikibon on Hybrid Cloud Realities, they discussed the 3 Laws of Cloud referenced by industry notables like Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware; Dheeraj Pandey, CEO, Nutanix; and Andy Jassy, CEO, AWS.
At LucidLink, we have been thinking long and hard about these three “laws”; although we may have framed them differently in our minds. That’s why we developed Filespaces™ a distributed cloud file service that addresses the needs of removing latency, increasing bandwidth, reducing data movement costs, and governance.
Because one cloud doesn’t fit all, we work with all object storage technologies. Cloud-based: Amazon S3, IBM Cloud, Wasabi, etc., and local on-prem solutions, including Cloudian, Ceph, Scality, and more.
In the past, hybrid clouds have not been the best solution for applications and data that are latency-sensitive. Why haven’t they worked? It’s quite simple when you understand why traditional file protocols don’t work well over distance. The heart of the problem is that these protocols are extremely “chatty” and were not designed for high-latency environments like the Internet. When applications work with files, they need to know a lot of information about the file itself. It is contained in the metadata, which comprises a tiny fraction of the overall file size (typically less than 0.5%), yet roughly 80% of the calls between the app and the file are to query that metadata.
As long as this is happening in a local LAN environment, there are virtually no latency issues. However, once you add distance into the equation, things break down very quickly as each one of those packets, despite carrying almost no data, must still travel the entire round trip, and those thousands (and sometimes tens of thousands) of round trips add up. How did we solve this? We de-coupled the metadata and the file data into separate planes, synced the metadata locally – where all of this “chatter” can take place – while establishing an efficient way to deliver parts of the file data as it is being requested (on-demand). We did this by using multiple TCP connections, inline compression, pre-fetching, and local caching.
What does that mean? Responsiveness is boosted, and file data is delivered efficiently and streamed on-demand. Our customers can use object storage in applications and places that were not previously practical.
Let’s talk about the laws of economics – specifically bandwidth and the cost of data movement.
We all know that the cost of storing data is often much cheaper than the price of taking it out. And every time you work on a large file, currently, you remove the whole file (cha-ching) and pay the egress fees. Here comes the beauty of LucidLink and cloud object storage. Working with object storage, we take just the portion of data that you are working on in the file. t I mean, come on, are you using the whole 250 GB file at once? Nope. Our log-structured file service quickly provides you with just the data you need, exactly when you want it. We are built on top of cloud object storage and leverage it virtually with high-speed performance and infinite capacity. Using object storage, you can manage storage costs much more tightly.
Encryption can impact your bandwidth by adding additional data to the stream, which requires more space to move. The quality and speed of the server you are connecting can also affect the bandwidth. If you have bandwidth limitations or your server is full, things slow down. The distance between your server and a user or application makes a big difference in the speed you receive.
We looked at all these things when creating LucidLink. We’ve dealt with latency as mentioned above by separating the metadata and the file data. Now let’s talk security.
Encryption is our middle name. One of our fundamentals in building Filespaces is our focus on security. To ensure customers are provided with a best-of-class solution for highly sensitive workloads, we use strong end-to-end, full-system encryption where all data is encrypted on the customer device and remains encrypted both in transit and at rest with only the customer in possession of the encryption keys.
When we discuss “the laws of the land,” we are talking about governance. We all know that each country and region can have different protocols. Today, organizations are subject to several regulations governing the protection and security of confidential information, data retention, and financial accountability, among others. LucidLink complies with all data security, device, and sovereignty mandates.
As you can see, we’ve addressed some of the most significant issues facing the technology industry when it comes to laws of physics, economics, and the land. To learn more – contact us or try out Filespaces.
SaaS offering, no hardware or IT support required
End-to-end security encryption
Works with any object storage
Instant on-demand file access from anywhere
Works with any OS