The milCloud 2.0 environment offers Department of Defense (DoD) mission partners a range of benefits for data storage by leveraging vendor technology, an all-flash storage architecture, and a welcome level of familiarity, experts explained during MeriTalk’s milCloud 2.0: Powering the Future of Cloud Storage webinar on October 20.
The milCloud 2.0 environment, which partners with commercial partners to provide solutions that meet DoD security requirements, offers an opportunity for agencies to move less-used data into the cloud at a low cost.
While many commercial cloud providers charge bandwidth fees, tagging fees, and fees for API calls that “make it very difficult to budget on a monthly basis,” milCloud 2.0 doesn’t charge those fees, said Paul Thuman, Federal Sales Manager at Cloudian. This enables customers to keep the data they frequently use in local storage, and move less frequently accessed data to lower tiers of storage in the cloud.
“I had a customer that had four petabytes of storage, and they were about to buy another two petabytes – that’s just what they’re used to doing. A simple question I had for them was, out of all that data … how much hasn’t been touched in six months? The customer actually laughed, and said ‘Well over 70 percent,’” Thuman recounted. “That becomes another good use case to use an application that, by policy, can move that data up to a more cost-effective tier, like Cloudian,” he said.
Another benefit that supports moving data to the cloud is milCloud 2.0’s all-flash architecture, a rarity in the world of cloud.
“One of the real benefits to milCloud 2.0, particularly when we talk about the block storage, is that it is entirely flash-based storage. There aren’t any other clouds in the world that I’m aware of that are built entirely off of memory-based storage media,” said Nick Psaki, Federal Chief Technology Officer at Pure Storage.
Psaki also noted the benefits of milCloud 2.0’s design when it comes to speed and durability, claiming that the architecture “will literally never get old.”
“milCloud 2.0 is built on an incredibly powerful set of API-driven technologies, and it is as much a modern cloud as you might encounter in the market today. It simply just works. The beauty of it is that the technologies were designed with the cloud-scale customer in mind to begin with,” he added.
With all of these vendor partners in the milCloud 2.0 environment, military users can also expect to see more integrations among applications, and a more familiar environment. “The learning curve is a blessing … operating in a cloud environment isn’t the same as what you’ve been operating in for the last 30 years and it poses significant skills gaps for staff and strategic initiatives. milCloud 2.0 works very much like most of the things you’re accustomed to seeing today,” said Psaki.
“GDIT, in partnership with Pure and Cloudian, is proud of what we’ve put together here,” said Eric McGrane, milCloud 2.0 Growth Leader for GDIT. “We are a very easy and simple to use cloud.”
This benefit is also supplemented by Cloudian’s native S3 architecture, which supports better integration with applications.
“If you don’t move workloads to cloud and keep it on-prem for whatever reason, you can just point that application to milCloud 2.0 and start consuming storage,” Thuman noted.
To hear more milCloud 2.0 insights, you can register to watch the on-demand webinar today.