1. Solutions Brief
Cloud Storage Solutions Brief
Introduction
One of IT’s biggest expenses is disk storage. ComputerWorld estimates that in many enterprises storage is
responsible for almost 30% of capital expenditures as the average growth of data approaches close to 50%
annually in most enterprise. Amid this milieu, there’s strong concern that enterprise will drown in the expense of
storing data, especially unstructured data.
To address this need, Cloud storage services have started to become popular. Ranging from Cloud storage
focused at the enterprise to that focused on end users, Cloud storage providers offer huge capacity cost
reductions, the elimination of labor required for storage management and maintenance, and immediate
provisioning of capacity at a very low cost per terabyte.
Cloud storage, though, is not a brand new concept. The central ideas for Cloud storage are related to past service
bureau computing paradigms and to those of application service providers and storage service providers of the
late 90’s.
This time, however, the economic situation and the advent of new technologies have sparked strong interest in
the Cloud storage provider model. With on-premises storage costs already high and rising in many IT
departments, Cloud storage providers can lower cost by off-loading the burden of storage management and
shielding enterprises from other costs as well, such as storage and network hardware changes. Cloud storage
providers deliver economies of scale by using the same storage capacity to meet the needs of many
organizations, passing the cost savings to their customer base.
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To help enterprises take advantage of this emerging trend, GridBank seamlessly integrates with Cloud storage
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environments, allowing enterprises to effortlessly migrate, archive, and tier their file, SharePoint and Exchange
data from on-site primary storage and servers to cloud storage targets. Leveraging its comprehensive security
model, GridBank insures extraordinary protection from authorized access for file, SharePoint, and Exchange data
deployed to Cloud storage configurations.
Overview
Organizations that use GridBank to connect to cloud storage environments enjoy the comprehensive feature sets
and business benefits of GridBank, while taking advantage of the cost reduction and deployment flexibility offered
by the cloud storage delivery model. Cloud environments can further enhance the benefits of GridBank, which
was developed to significantly reduce storage and data management costs, provide automated policy-based
storage management, and help meet compliance and regulatory needs. By moving data to Cloud storage, IT can
also reduce power and cooling costs on-premise and enjoy a “Greener” data center environment.
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2. Solutions Brief
GridBank Configuration with Cloud Storage Service Provider Target
GridBank directly supports the Cloud storage service providers’ file system interfaces, which means enterprises
do not need to have the Cloud service providers’ “gateway”. If an organization elects to do so, GridBank, typically,
will not require the “gateway’s” use. Since GridBank writes directly to the Cloud storage service providers’ file
system interfaces, all of GridBank’s extensive features apply to datasets placed at the Cloud storage provider.
GridBank Cloud Storage Management
One of the unique technologies at the core of GridBank is its comprehensive object-based cloud archiving storage
platform. GridBank stores file, SharePoint, and Exchange places content into Cloud storage (as well as traditional
on-premise virtual storage pools) as objects. Each object consists of three main components: the file itself,
metadata that describes the file, and configurable policies that manage numerous elements such as retention,
security and access. Metadata provides an easy and fast method for the search and retrieval of information that
exists in either GridBank’s virtual storage pools or Cloud storage.
GridBank Cloud Storage Integration Takes Only a Few Simple Steps
As data is tiered into GridBank, the contents are indexed and made fully searchable with GridBank’s sophisticated
search engine. For objects with no content, such as video and graphics, GridBank allows the creation of custom
metadata tags so even non-text data can easily be searched and retrieved. To insure the utmost in security for
data stored in the Cloud, searching, retrieving, viewing and sharing are tied tightly to GridBank’s identity centric
role-based security scheme.
This object-based model allows GridBank to control and manage the backend of on-site storage targets through
the creation of virtual heterogeneous storage pools where file, SharePoint, and Exchange-based data objects are
archived. GridBank’s virtual storage pools are vendor and hardware agnostic, scalable to petabytes (PB) of data,
self-healing, and highly fault tolerant. GridBank supports multiple cloud storage service providers as targets for
GridBank archives, repositories, and libraries just as it does for on-site virtual storage pools, meaning all of
GridBank’s features are available to data stored in the Cloud.
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3. Solutions Brief
Object metadata is always kept in the GridBank server grid in an organization’s data center. For data stored with
Cloud storage service providers this is a critical advantage of GridBank’s design. This results in very high-speed
search functionality for data residing in Cloud storage, as searching and viewing takes place on-premise in
GridBank’s Metabase not at the Cloud storage service provider. By having search and E-discovery executed in
the enterprise’s data center there is no need to connect to the Cloud storage provider. This substantially reduces
Cloud storage bandwidth and connection costs.
Organizations can easily and quickly connect GridBank to any number of Cloud storage service providers.
GridBank’s easy-to-use Cloud Storage Wizard allows customers to create connections to various cloud storage
targets; it can attach different cloud storage to different GridBank clusters, a single GridBank cluster to multiple
cloud storage providers, and provides for both on-premise virtual storage pools and Cloud storage connectivity to
the same GridBank configuration. GridBank currently supports several Cloud storage service providers, including
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Nirvanix, Iron Mountain, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure , Zetta and any provider using the Mezeo cloud platform
with additional Cloud storage providers to be added on a continual basis. Please check with Tarmin for the list of
current Cloud storage service providers supported.
GridBank’s Easy-to-Use Cloud Wizard
GridBank’s powerful migration and replication policies allow data to be moved wherever it is most effective.
Moving data from one cloud service provider to another or from a GridBank storage pool to a cloud service
provider is fully automated. Just create the appropriate migration or replication policy and GridBank does the rest.
With the ability to migrate and replicate from cloud to cloud, virtual storage pool to virtual storage pool, and cloud
to virtual storage pool, GridBank delivers optimal flexibility, avoids Cloud storage or on-premise storage vendor
lock-in, and provides content distribution and archive disaster protection. All this is completely transparent and in
the background with full access to the data while the migration is taking place.
With GridBank, Cloud storage is configured, managed, and accessed as easily as data on GridBank’s virtual
storage pools on-premise.
GridBank Enhances Cloud Storage Security
Cloud storage services are ideal for all types of unstructured data requirements, including archiving, tiering, and
migration of file, SharePoint, and Exchange-based data. However, as several recent studies have noted,
enterprise customers frequently consider public Cloud storage security to be inadequate, making it one of the
biggest hurdles for enterprise-level deployments. GridBank solves this problem by providing a highly secure
solution for Cloud storage installations.
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4. Solutions Brief
A core strength of GridBank’s architecture is its array of security features, which are all fully applicable for cloud
storage deployments. GridBank encrypts data before it is migrated/tiered from primary storage to a GridBank
Cloud storage target. IT can chose from several levels of encryption, ranging up to 448-bit blowfish, and different
encryption policies can be set for different data sets. Encryption happens on-premise before data is sent over the
IP network to the Cloud service provider. Also, data at rest with the Cloud provider is also encrypted. When data
is retrieved, decryption can only happen when the person downloading the data has the right role-based access.
For example, if an archive for the operations department is placed in Cloud storage the encryption will take place
before the data is sent from the enterprise to the Cloud storage provider and only those with the right role-based
access to that operations data will be allowed to retrieve the data and to decrypt it.
GridBank Encrypts Data before It is Sent to Cloud Storage
GridBank provides powerful identity-centric role-based security access through integration with Active Directory
(AD) and the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to data place in Cloud storage. Using the standard
role-based access established for AD or LDAP, data sent to archives, libraries, or repositories in the Cloud
storage has the right user access assigned to each object. This means only those individuals specified by AD
and LDAP to have appropriate access to the data will allowed to view, search, share, retrieve and decrypt the
data from Cloud storage. GridBank also allows IT administrators to assign supplementary role-based security
over and above what an enterprise deploys with AD or LDAP
Additional security features to ensure the security of data placed in Cloud storage by GridBank include:
• Multiple GridBank administrator security levels.
• Application of unique digital signatures for every object.
• Comprehensive audit management at allows IT to track each file, SharePoint or Exchange data object in
the cloud storage configuration: who archived it, accessed it, shared it, published it, and retrieved it.
In short, GridBank delivers the utmost in complete security for an enterprise’s data stored in Cloud storage!
Summary and GridBank Cloud Storage Business Benefits
Companies and government entities are facing an explosion of file, SharePoint, and Exchange data. This
incredible data growth and the maturation of Cloud storage technology have led to a number of strong Cloud
storage service provider offerings.
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5. Solutions Brief
To enable enterprises to leverage the wide availability of Cloud storage service providers, Tarmin’s GridBank
provides seamless integration. Not only is data easily tiered, archived, and migrated to Cloud storage, but
GridBank’s extensive policy management, search and E-discovery, and security feature sets are all as readily
available for Cloud storage as they are for on-premise secondary storage. GridBank’s Cloud storage support
provides a wide range of business-critical benefits, including:
• Excellent ROI – With cloud storage costs decreasing daily, the return on GridBank is almost instant.
After migration, free space is immediately available on primary on-site storage, the data is highly secure
in the low cost cloud storage, and users can transparently access information data from the Cloud
storage almost as fast as on-premise GridBank storage virtual pools.
• Storage optimization and management efficiency – The primary storage footprint is reduced by
seamlessly archiving data to Cloud storage. Cloud storage capacity use is also reduced though single
instancing, data compression, thin provisioning, and quota management, cutting Cloud storage costs.
• Military-strength security – Leveraging GridBank’s numerous security options, data in cloud storage
completely secure.
• Transparent and simple user experience – Users transparently and rapidly access data via one of
GridBank’s several methods - regardless of whether the data actually resides in Cloud storage on one
of GridBank’s on-premise virtual storage pools
• Automated policy-based management – GridBank’s policy management framework allows
organizations to migrate/tier the data from primary hosts and storage to cost effective cloud storage
with complete security. All policies created by GridBank can be applied to the data migrated to the
cloud storage, just as it does for GridBank on-premise virtual storage pools.
• E-discovery, search, and indexing – Finding data in cloud storage has traditionally been extremely slow
but with GridBank’s E-discovery and indexing technology, it is a matter of seconds. The GridBank index
lives in the enterprise on GridBank’s server grid, providing users with the ability to find the data quickly
and perform E-discovery requests very efficiently.
• Flexible deployment – Customers can deploy to cloud storage, on-premise, or a combination of both,
depending upon customer cost, security, and management plans.
• Green storage solution – Gives customers a more environmentally friendly storage infrastructure, as
there is no need to power and cool storage on-site (reducing the carbon footprint), and a reduction of
the amount of physical material that needs to be recycled when physical storage hardware becomes
obsolete.
With these benefits, organizations will be better prepared to take advantage of the availability of quality Cloud
storage service providers by deploying Cloud storage with industry acclaimed GridBank.
About Tarmin
Tarmin Inc. is a leading provider of cloud archiving storage platforms. Tarmin’s award winning cloud archiving
solution organizes archival data silos spread across a companies data centers to public or private clouds,
optimizing information access while conserving storage and reducing costs. Providing transparent archiving
capability through the integration of cloud and traditional storage into a single pool, Tarmin delivers infinite
scalability, an object-based storage model, and a non-disruptive technology adoption path. While substantially
lowering storage and IT CAPEX and OPEX, Tarmin’s cloud archiving platform enables unified retention, search
and case management, and consistent policy management and security across all archives - be they in a public
cloud, private cloud, or on traditional on premise storage. Tarmin creates an easily manageable approach to cloud
archiving that improves data and storage management, satisfies any organization’s regulatory, governance, and
compliance requirements, and delivers a “Green” friendly storage solution. Tarmin has received numerous
industry accolades including: Finalist for Storage Magazine’s Best Enterprise Storage Product of 2009 (Jan,
2010), one of the “Nine Storage Companies to Watch” by Network World and CIO magazines (August 2009), and
©Tarmin Inc., 2010 Cloud Storage Solutions Brief 04/15/10

6. Solutions Brief
Storage Magazine UK’s “One to Watch” Award (June 2009). Tarmin is headquartered in Silicon Valley, California.
For more information, please visit www.tarmin.com or e-mail Tarmin at info@tarmin.com.
Tarmin, Inc
465 La Canada Court, Suite 101
Morgan Hill, CA 94301
Phone: +1 (866) 4 TARMIN
Email: sales@tarmin.com
info@tarmin.com
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© 2010 Tarmin Inc. All rights reserved. Tarmin, GridBank, NOADS, and the NOADS logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Tarmin in the United States
and other countries. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Tarmin, Inc makes no warranties, expressed or implied, by operation of law or
otherwise, relating to this document, the products or the computer software programs described herein. The information contained in this document is subject to
change without notice. Tarmin Inc assumes no responsibility for any errors that may appear.
All other trade names, trademarks, registered trademarks and service marks used and mentioned in this document are the rightful property of their respective
owners. CLOUD STORAGE SOLUTIONS BRIEF - 041510
©Tarmin Inc., 2010 Cloud Storage Solutions Brief 04/15/10