Why Ellen Rubin and ClearSky Data are betting on the hybrid cloud
While the largest companies in the world are starting to figure out what Silicon Valley startups have known for years — it’s way easier and cheaper to use cloud computing services — cloud storage has required a bit more convincing. After all, it’s one thing to run a few apps on Amazon Web Services, but it’s quite another for conservative CIOs to warm up to the idea of storing their extremely sensitive corporate data outside of their control.
Fortunately for Ellen Rubin, co-founder and CEO of newly launched ClearSky Data, that’s starting to change. Rubin, who will be speaking at Structure 2015 in November, thinks that the combination of breakthroughs in storage caching technology (thanks to her co-founder, CTO Laz Vekiarides) and lots of spare Metro Ethernet capacity means the time is right for enterprises to consider a hybrid approach to cloud storage. But Rubin also sees a cultural shift in the way cloud services are being evaluated that’s making it easier for companies like ClearSky to emerge.
Rubin and Vekiarides raised the money for ClearSky Data last year, but kept quiet while working on their idea. Last month at VMworld, the company emerged from stealth mode with its take on a modern approach to storage needs: a hybrid combination of a storage appliance in the customer’s data center, cached storage within a metropolitan area, and cold storage on Amazon’s S3 service.
They call it “Global Storage Network,” and the idea is that it can eliminate the latency that derailed previous attempts at providing such services. ClearSky analyzes a customer’s data and labels it “hot,” “warm,” or “cold,” depending on how frequently the customer needs to access it. The system then assigns that data to one of the three piles, and refines its labeling over time as employees access that data in the course of their work.
“The secret sauce of what we’re doing is moving the data around a distributed network,” Rubin says. This isn’t a new idea, she points out, but the networking infrastructure and the algorithms that control that movement have become much more mature than even a few years ago.
The nature of ClearSky’s service might come off as a little heretical to cloud purists: I mean, a datacenter appliance? After all, plenty of companies rely entirely on cloud storage through Amazon or companies like Box and Dropbox.
But Rubin argues that we live in a hybrid world, where pure cloud services are going to live alongside self-managed infrastructure, especially among the Fortune 100 companies that ClearSky is targeting with its services. During seven years of experience navigating the growth of cloud services (Rubin co-founded CloudSwitch in 2008, which was later sold to Verizon in 2011), she’s developed a “pragmatic” worldview about this era of IT, which might have a little something to do with the fact that she lives and works in Boston, 3,000 miles away from the hype machine that is Silicon Valley.
“Let’s accept that hybrid cloud is going to be the deal for the foreseeable future,” she argues, noting that companies that are determined to be native cloud (like Pinterest, who I talked to last week) still wind up juggling lots of different cloud service providers — from Amazon to VMware to OpenStack — across all their corporate needs. If it makes more sense to host some of those workloads in house, why not?
“I understand why people get frustrated,” she says. “Hybrid cloud (can become) an excuse for an enterprise IT team to not figure out what their strategy is.” But sometimes it’s hard to remember that concepts like cloud computing and cloud storage are still very new to a lot of companies, and it takes a lot longer for enterprise technology to become mainstream compared to consumer technology.
Catch Rubin’s appearance at Structure 2015 on November 18th at the Julia Morgan Ballroom in San Francisco. You can find more information here, and you can buy your tickets here.
