Cloud Edge Use Cases Part 2: Storage Repatriation

Storage Repatriation

From the AvidThink New Middle Mile report that features Aarna Networks, we see the following three use cases emerging for the cloud edge (aka the new middle mile) orchestration:

1. Edge MultiCloud Networking

2. Storage Repatriation

3. Cloud Edge Machine Learning

In part 1 of this blog series, we discussed the Edge MultiCloud networking use case.

In this blog, we’ll explore the storage repatriation use case. In an insightful piece by Andressen Horowitz titled “The Cost of Cloud, a Trillion Dollar Paradox”, the authors observed how the cloud is a powerful vehicle for a growth stage company to accelerate their journey and yet the same cloud is a drag for later stage companies by compressing their margins. The article continues with some best practices that include incremental repatriation back from the public cloud. In another article David Heinemeier Hansson discusses why Basecamp abandoned public clouds. 

While we are not suggesting anything as radical as completely abandoning public clouds, we are suggesting that repatriating storage (and in future databases) to a datacenter location should be considered. You could also call this design pattern cloud-adjacent storage. By being on a neutral site, the user can enjoy numerous benefits:

• Run compute in public or private clouds and access storage without paying egress costs (thus cutting OPEX). 
• Even if you plan to use the public cloud, you can take advantage of cost arbitrage and move your compute to different clouds on an almost daily basis, again slashing OPEX.
• Get the ideal storage performance you want. Spot pricing makes this option especially attractive, and using spot instances is only possible if the persistent storage is in a neutral site.
• Get the data closer to the edge, where Gartner predicts 75% of the world’s data will be created by 2025, thus saving on bandwidth costs of moving the data to the public cloud. For example, by using log filtering, most logs could be stored on the cloud edge while just a subset could be sent to services such as Splunk or to the public cloud.

An example of cloud adjacent storage is as follows:

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Aarna Edge Services (AES)

The AES SaaS offering provides initial orchestration and ongoing management of topologies such as the one shown above. It features an easy-to-use GUI that can slash weeks of work into less than an hour. In case of a failure, AES includes fault isolation and roll-back capabilities. The first version of AES supports the following digital products (with more to come):

• Equinix Metal
• Equinix Fabric
• Equinix Network Edge (Cisco C8000V)
• Azure Express Route
• Pure Storage (coming soon)
• AWS Direct Connect (coming soon)

Please see the demo and feel free to request a trial.