Given the topic you are posting on, my question would be what happens if ClearSky goes out of business? Potentially any file system hosted on your storage would just disappear, right? (And the DR capability too, if I am reading your website correctly.)

I don't mean to be negative but I'm having some trouble seeing how the ClearSky feature set justifies assuming what looks like an existential risk to business-critical data on the service. Interested in your thoughts on this.

edit: typo

Exactly. Besides the obvious technical implications of off-site, "cloud-based" storage, what happens if ClearSky can't pay it's hosting bill? Presumably, your many TBs of data (which could take weeks to transfer) would vanish into thin air.

This is a valid concern and I am the wrong person to answer it (not being on the business side of things) but I can get you in touch with someone who can.

We don't use public cloud. We're hosted on dedicated hardware for a number of reasons. While we're not opposed to commercial solutions, we strongly prefer open source solutions for obvious reasons (like, this ClusterHQ situation).

You don't have to. We provide iSCSI or FC access points in your private datacenter.

Is the hardware storing the data in-datacentre too? I think that was the key thing.

We (ClearSky) store your data off-site (except a small cache), but provide performance as if the data were on-site.

I don't believe you. There's no way you're coming even close to local disk performance with an off-prem solution.

Feel free to prove me wrong but I don't think that this is a reasonable solution for backing storage for a database.

Well it seems clear to me that they can only provide that level of performance for blocks already in their onsite cache. Presumably they're using a novel compression/de-duplication scheme and maybe prioritizing blocks using historical and/or predictive analysis to cache the right data at the right time but you can only transfer data as fast as you can transfer it. I'm guessing a full export of all of your data (that isn't cached) is going to go as fast as the line/compression allows.

Bandwidth is much less a problem for OLTP workloads than latency is. (If all you care about is bandwidth, S3 is your friend.)

With ClearSky, even for workloads that don't fit in the edge cache (which we believe are few), you'll still see single-digit millisecond random read (and write) latencies. This is made possible by our points of presence (PoPs) located in each metro area we serve. These PoPs house the lion's share of data in a private cloud, and are connected to each customer site with private lines with sub-millisecond latency.

In other words, the speed of light is very fast when it goes in a straight line with nothing in its way ;) While we do have some secret sauce in the data pipeline, it is because we own the network to the customer that we can provide the performance we do.

(Fancy PDF with a few more details here: http://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/445689/2015_assets/ClearSky-Da...)

Check out this report if you don't believe me: http://www.clearskydata.com/clearsky-takes-primary-storage-t...

Several members of our team were core developers of EqualLogic (pre-Dell buyout). We have significant investment from Akamai. I promise you this is not snake oil.

Check out this report? A link to a marketing data collection form? Come on. Link me to the PDF. Let's see the technical details of exactly how your solution is built out.

Technical details are here [1], though if entering a name and e-mail in a form is off-putting to you, I'm not sure anything could convince you to take the step of switching enterprise storage vendors.

Aside, I can't express how validating it is how much you (and others, given the downvotes) disbelieve me. It makes me quite proud to have helped develop a service considered so impossible that it is written off as black magic. It does make it hard to market the damn thing though ;)

[1] http://www.clearskydata.com/clearsky-global-storage-network-...

Wow.

First, this is a technical audience. Plenty (most?) of us couldn't give a shit about what marketing says. I believe about half of what comes out of the mouths of sales/marketing folks -- for good reason. We don't care what Gardner or some firm you paid to write up a report says.

Personally, I have a real dislike of sales/marketing folks and I will avoid them at all costs... so, no, I don't want to give you my name or e-mail address. I don't want your people calling me, interrupting real work. I don't want to view your webinar. I want to look at the technical details -- the facts -- and decide for myself and then, quite possibly, completely forget I ever heard about your company and go about my day.

Last, don't fool yourself. The downvotes aren't "validation" -- at all -- but, hey, go on living in your fantasy world. If it really was as awesome as you seem to think it is, it wouldn't be hard to market. To the contrary, the damn thing would sell itself and you wouldn't even need a marketing department.

Your loss buddy.

So you are essentially doing AWS Storage Gateway then?

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/latest/userguide/G...

No. ClearSky provides several features that Storage Gateway does not:

* ClearSky has a dedicated private network to every customer ensuring low latency.

* ClearSky fully manages disaster recovery; you lose no data if your datacenter is destroyed.

* ClearSky provides transparent instantaneous data mobility: you can move volumes to any other data center in a matter of seconds.

* ClearSky provides and manages the edge cache.

All of the above must be provided by the customer with Amazon's offering.

So it's stored on a public cloud?

Yes.