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August 14, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 21
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A Place In The Cloud
Mezeo’s Cloud Storage Services Provide Competitive Edge For Texas ISP
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 In the highly competitive IT industry, services providers must constantly weigh new types of technologies and services to add to their offerings. So when SoftLayer, a provider of virtual data center services, began hearing requests from its clients for more and better solutions for mobile and remote workers, SoftLayer’s engineers turned to cloud computing technology to help them create a new service to satisfy their clients’ mobile computing needs.
“Traditionally, storage in a data center environment has only been available to a local machine. We were looking for something that would allow customers to access their data, but people now are used to having information at their fingertips all of the time, so it’s natural they’d start wanting more from their service providers,” explains Nathan Day, the CTO at Plano, Texas,-based SoftLayer (www.softlayer.com).
The SoftLayer team decided to focus on cloud computing and, particularly, cloud storage as a service that it felt customers would most appreciate. It began evaluating several providers of cloud storage technology, including both service providers and software makers that would provide the storage services for resale by SoftLayer.
Cloud storage, like cloud computing, enables users to access via the Internet computing resources located on a variety of different devices. With cloud storage, users can upload or download files via the Internet and the clients of their choice. Cloud storage is convenient for people who don’t have a private connection to the office server but need to access work-related files while on the road or from home.
 Buy, Build, Or Borrow?
To select a cloud storage application, Day and his team spent several weeks looking at eight different vendors and products. The team decided against reselling another provider’s storage service because they felt it would have limited their ability to customize the software.
“We wanted to have a certain level of control,” says Day. “Going to a third-party solution, we wouldn’t have had that level of control.”
Conversely, Day also considered handling the development in-house, with SoftLayer engineers building the entire cloud storage layer. The downside to that, however, was the amount of time it would likely take to create a product from scratch. Given that products already existed that did much of what SoftLayer needed, investing in a custom development didn’t seem worthwhile, says Day.
“The level of service that we wanted to provide meant the solution had to be fairly complex. It wouldn’t have been hard for us to put together a simpler solution, but this was more complex,” says Day.
A Good Fit
In October 2008, SoftLayer decided on Mezeo Software’s Cloud Storage Platform (www.mezeo.com), a Linux-based platform specifically made for IT service providers that want to develop their own cloud storage services. “Behind the Mezeo software, we’ve got different levels of servers running the software, redundant databases to track the data. . . . It’s quite a cluster that we’ve built up. So it was nice not to have to worry about the software side by going with Mezeo,” Day says.
Mezeo uses REST (Representational State Transfer)-style Web services, an architecture style designed for creating distributed networks of URL-based resources. That architectural approach makes it easier for developers to integrate advanced storage, management, and collaboration capabilities into applications. That ability was one major factor in Mezeo’s favor, according to Day. The SoftLayer developers appreciated Mezeo’s flexible storage organization with hierarchical organization, tagging, and enhanced file sharing and collaboration.
“The Mezeo solution includes collaboration tools, so you can share files with others with varying permissions. You can share it on a read-write or read-only basis, for instance, so you could use it as a publication platform to make files available to many people,” says Day, who adds that because it supports industry standards such as HTTP and WebDAV, it is easier to customize.
SoftLayer’s engineers did some initial testing on a demonstration cluster of Web servers, application servers, and database servers to see how the software ran under different loads and conditions. Then, in March, SoftLayer began integrating Mezeo into its infrastructure. The work took eight weeks and involved setting up a high-availability storage cluster, customizing the user interface, and setting up business rules for the service to handle issues such as quality of service and billing. They used the Mezeo API to integrate it into the SoftLayer customer management
application, for managing customer accounts and billing.
The Final Product
The resulting CloudLayer Storage product supports a range of clients, including BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows, Web 2.0, Windows Mobile, WebDAV for the Mac, and Linux clients. The Mezeo software serves as the front end for access to the content, while the files themselves are stored on a high-availability SAN, which is equipped with load balancers and redundant databases.
SoftLayer’s other storage access service—StorageLayer—is designed for higher-performance storage and can be accessed either via a customer management portal or by integrating access into a customer’s own interface using StorageLayer’s API.
CloudLayer Storage and StorageLayer can be used together, with StorageLayer providing the high-performance corporate storage needed for real-time access to databases and CloudLayer serving as the remote access point for employees wanting to get to work documents, such as the reports run from the database. Files on CloudLayer can be shared with other colleagues without having to email the document, and the access is secured via 256-bit AES encryption and SSL encryption.
Either of the storage services can also be combined with SoftLayer’s new CloudLayer Computing service, which it launched at the same time as CloudLayer. The services can also be used with a different cloud computing environment of the customer’s choice, or the storage can be accessed without any additional application overlay.
Day says he expects the CloudLayer Storage to become popular with IT workers, mobile employees, and younger workers used to accessing files remotely over the Internet. “It’s a new generation coming up, which grew up with iPhones and living in front of the computer screen,” he says.
Day himself makes use of CloudLayer storage, as do a few others in the company, especially the IT professionals who have firsthand experience with the technology and, thus, find it natural to use. “It’s a great service for people who have groups of road warriors out there,” says Day. 
by Sue Hildreth
Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform
The Mezeo Cloud Storage Platform is a software application with REST (Representational State Transfer)-style Web services APIs and WebDAV support aimed at service providers that want to implement and deliver their own cloud storage services. The Linux-based platform attaches to the provider’s existing storage infrastructure through any mountable file system, letting providers customize their levels of service. As a stateless architecture, the platform scales linearly to support a large customer base. “The Mezeo solution includes collaboration tools, so you can share files with others with varying permissions. You can share it on a read-write or read-only basis, for instance, so you could use it as a publication platform to make files available to many people,” says Nathan Day, CTO at SoftLayer.
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