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In a time when everyone talks about cloud computing everyone seems to forget why or why not we should move our data to the cloud. Storage... Isn't that something you can buy in you local computer store such as "Media Markt" or a discount "Shopping Mall"?
It sounds like a joke. But believe me, I heard it more than several times. In the past year and half, I've been working intensively with redesigning Backup and Recovery, moving inactive data to another Tier layers, implementing Archiving, Introduce new NAS Storage and now upgrade our SAN with two new Clariion systems. In the meantime I did three Storage Courses to. Heavy? Yes! So believe me, I can therefore say that it was an eventful year. But it has paid off, because finally it's on the Management agenda. Let's face it, we can not ignore data growth anno 2009 - 2011 and beyond. If you think storing your enterprise data is a tough challenge now, it's nothing compared to what it might be in just a few years. According to a new study from research firm IDC and storage vendor EMC, data requirements are growing at an annual rate of 60 percent. 281 exabytes total in 2011. So this findings should serve as a wake-up call to enterprises. These facts indicates that there has something to be done. And explain to your boss why he does not want to buy storage in a discount "Shopping Mall". Try to convince him that there are more than hundred people work at the same time and uses the same disks and disk space. Refer to Exchange or your Fileserver(s) as an example. You have to deal with Availability. I guess you want no data loss. Put your disks in a RAID, to protect your data. Use local or even remote replication through mirroring your data between more than one datacenter in case of a Disaster. This requires some technical complexity. You need high-quality disks, why... because :). An important one is data integrity. Data integrity refers to mechanisms such as error correction codes or parity bits which ensures that data is written to disks exactly as it was received. Any variation in data during it's retrievel implies corruption, which may affect the operations of the organization. I think at this point you convinced him. We are still not there. There are three important ones left. Together with the above mentioned issues, why you should purchase durable storage, these ones are also more relevent for Cloud Storage.
The infrastructure must support performance requirements. Your applications should be able to provide optimal performance and service all the processing requests at high speed. Try to find disks that runs at 15,000 rpm in your local store. All that hundred people who work at the same time may not simultaneously be hampered by slow applications. Not the measured value counts, the user experience is more valuable. Can this be guaranteed by a Cloud? And where to start if it's not. I give you with some certainty the Cloud vendor will point there finger at you first. Data center operations require adequate resources to store and process large amounts of data, When capacity requirements increase the data center must be able to provide the additional capacity. For this, Cloud is a good solution. Expanding the same sources also requires some technical complexity and therefore your need an advanced storage. Local cheap disks will not do the trick. Security: Policies, procedures, and proper integeration of the datacenter core elements that will prevent unauthorized access to information must be establisched. Can this be guaranteed by a Cloud? And where to start if it's not. It has to be secure at all time, that's for sure. The level of security depends also on what kind of data or information there is. In the Netherlands where I live there is an exceedingly high security requirement of the Government regarding Health care information such as EPD ( Electronic Patient Dossier ). Do you want this in the Cloud and can this be guaranteed? course there are more like the same examples. Some require an exceedingly high security by Government and other require high security by the company. So it Depends wich data or information you want in the Cloud together with the associated security. Cloud or not? Is Storage, a Cloud storm or not? Well, it depends I think. In the 'early' years and still al that basically matters was capacity. From that point of view I think Cloud initiatives can make the difference. because in a Cloud you pay per Netto capacity. But the growth can also make your environment unmanaged large. Costs will rise to some point you wonder whether it is still profitable. Maybe you want to go back and host it yourself again. How will that go? No one seems to be talking about that. Ok fair, this was not the approach at the first time, but still something to consider.
A big plus is that you do not need attention for cooling the Equipment. Save space per square meter in the data center and spend less on training. The tight IT budgets can provide solace to cloud computing, but on the other hand you still have to deal with performance. Just the past year and half I have seen a shift from capacity to performance. (read also this article ) Applications become more heavier than we used to in the pass. It is true that hardware and servers are faster as well but there is also a growth in complexity and dependency regarding these applications. Someone told me, many businesses will realize that having well defined SLA's will be a key point when buying cloud services. They have to be aware when they no longer can go next door to yell on the IT guys until they fix the problem and profits starts to disappear during an outage with no apparent person to point fingers at, they will understand the consequences of their budget cuts. I haven't heard of any real cloud service yet that hasn't had major issues and they won't magically disappear in a cloud, just have larger consequences.
So far till 2013 will be marked and dominated by cloud storage. Companies like VMware, IBM, EMC, HP, Symantec, HDS and NetApp working on it. There are technologies such as virtual disks', 'thin provisioning', 'reservation less snapshots',' automated quality of service ', Support for Fiber Channel and iSCSI on the same platform and intelligent power management. Almost every major storage vendor will have these technologies in-house and service them to customers or IT provider. New technologies that will used to will be 4-TB (terabyte) SATA hard drives, self-storage tiering with solid state drives (SSD) and encryption of data on separate storage devices. An Offsite backup can be very interesting. For now my opinion is that data should remain inside the organisation because of the immediate availability and performance. Companies like VMware, IBM, EMC, HP, Symantec, HDS and NetApp working very hard on it but are not ready for the takeover of our data.
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Good discussion, so thanks. You're quite right -- different people will feel about storage differently. It's easy to come up with literally dozens of different use cases for cloud storage -- and that's today!
Most people today are focusing on the costs (presumably less) of cloud-based options. Sure, there will be some people who are motivated by economic reasons.
I, for one, think that cloud-based storage will really take off when people realize that it can be better in some ways than its traditional counterpart.
Given that trust and security concerns can be addressed, wouldn't you like to have all your personal information in cloud-based "safe box" that can be accessed anywhere and at anytime? Much like your bank accounts?
From an enterprise perspective, putting information in the cloud can result in better user experiences (information can be dynamically relocated nearer to where it's being used), and made more resiliant (imagine multiple copies geographically dispersed).
I'm sure this will be an interesting discussion going forward.
-- Chuck