Five questions about cloud storage technology

Cloud storage technology is certainly not a science project, but it is applicable to some or even all of the data in a business organization. Here are 5 key questions about cloud storage technologies that will help enterprise users decide whether to adopt cloud storage technology.

1. What is cloud storage technology and how does it work?

100 people will have 100 different answers to this question. Fundamentally, cloud storage technology is a useful service that provides many users with a shared storage pool that is accessed over the network. Storage clouds are adjustable and can be easily scaled or tailored to customer needs.

2. What is the difference between a public cloud and a private cloud?

A public cloud is a pay-as-you-use storage service. All of its components are outside the customer's firewall, and the shared infrastructure is separated from each other and can be accessed through a secure network connection.

Public cloud storage technology providers such as Amazon and its S3 services typically charge monthly per storage capacity, while also charging a certain bandwidth usage fee for transmitting data. Public cloud customers do not need to be equipped with physical storage hardware or any special technical knowledge.

Cloud storage Technology Service providers manage the storage infrastructure to build storage capacity into storage pools to meet the needs of many customers. Users typically access their stored data over a network connection.

A private storage cloud is typically built behind a company's firewall and requires the use of all or authorized hardware and software from the company. All corporate data is kept within the company and is fully controlled by internal IT staff. Those employees can build storage capacity into storage pools that are used by various departments within the company or by different project groups.

Like a public cloud, a private cloud can easily and rapidly increase the storage capacity of a storage pool by adding servers to the storage pool. Parascale's cloud storage and Caringo's Castor are two examples of applications that can be used to build private cloud storage systems.

Engates describes the difference between a private cloud and a public cloud: "Users are still in the IT business, software configuration business, storage management and support business, and data center business." You still need to equip all these resources. ”

There is only one exception. Customers do not need to equip a private storage cloud as part of a public storage cloud that is built and used exclusively by a customer. Such users need to pay a higher fee, as is the case in hospitals where the use of dedicated wards is subject to higher costs.

"In fact, the difference between public cloud storage technology and private cloud storage technology is the way users connect to the cloud," said Mike Maxey, director of product management at Parascale. ”

"If you connect through a WAN and share resources with other customers, it's a public cloud storage technology," Maxey explains. This is useful for businesses that are widely distributed and do not share infrastructure for developing software. This public cloud storage technology is also useful if you need to send instantaneous data, such as movie trailers. Temporary storage in the public cloud storage technology is useful. ”

3. Does cloud storage technology work for all types of data?

Of course not. Cloud storage technology is best at handling large amounts of unstructured and archived data, such as credit cards, mortgage applications, or medical history data. Currently, the public cloud is not able to safely and reliably handle the transaction files or databases that need to maintain a fast network connection. Cloud storage technology is not applicable to any network transaction process.

Jim Ziernick, president and CEO of Santiago Nirvanix Inc., argues that cloud storage technology also does not apply to tier two and module data storage. "If someone wants to replace a SAN that supports a transaction processing system such as a CRM system, our product is not suitable," he said. Although we also do module-level storage, network latency can lead to significant hysteresis. ”

"What we can do with cloud storage is getting users to access their NAS," he added. ”

Data backup, archiving, and disaster recovery are the three main uses of the cloud, Engates said.

"The cloud is suitable for any large-scale storage application environment that requires static type data," he said. You don't want to store the database in the cloud, but you might be able to keep a historical copy of the database in the cloud without using expensive SAN or NAS technologies to save them. ”

"Based on experience, cloud storage technology only applies to applications where network latency is low," says Terri McClure, a storage analyst at the Strategy Group, a research organization in Milford, Massachusetts. Backup, archive, and large amounts of file data are well-suited for storage in the cloud, and they have little demand for response time. "On the other hand, databases and other data that are sensitive to performance requirements are not suitable for cloud storage technology, because network latency is too severe for them."

Mark Tonsetic, a project manager at Corporate Executive Board's Infrastructure executive committee, said, but before saving data to the cloud, users need to address a more fundamental issue.

"If you use cloud storage technology, can it solve the problem of why storage growth is out of control and the value of storing a set of special data across end-to-end business processing," Tonsetic said. Just transferring technology to the cloud is not the best solution. ”

4. Who is currently using cloud storage technology and how are they using cloud storage technology?

Many startups and new Web 2.0-based service providers such as San Francisco's Cloudize Inc. are big users of cloud storage technology, at least for now. Cloudize claims to be the first provider of SaaS file collaboration tools focused on small and midsize business users. Company chief executive Edwin Fu says the company's tools can centrally manage all the files of an enterprise in a cheap, scalable, and collaborative way.

Cloudize's Web 2.0-based application software enables Salesforce.com users to store and share data such as sales presentations and videos in a public cloud. San Diego's Nirvanix is responsible for providing the public storage cloud behind Cloudize.

Fu had worked at Salesforce.com for some time, noting that many of Salesforce.com's users were registered as users of cloud storage technology. "We chose to serve Salesforce.com users because they were happy with SaaS and SaaS-based storage," he said. They've saved the most sensitive contact data to the cloud. All we have to do is continue to provide them with more and better services. ”

In large enterprises, cloud storage technology users are also relatively small. "We are still in the early stages of promotion," said Nirvanix's Ziemick. In general, when we refer to our clients, we are referring to the early adopters. ”

These early clients included highly regulated financial services companies and content delivery network providers. Ziernick says many of those in the enterprise are trying to use cloud storage technology and plan for some proof-of-concept.

Louisiana Lafayette's emergency drug management and services company Schumacher Group will keep a large number of documents, including contracts and reports, on Salesforce.com's cloud platform force.com. It also stores all accounts receivable, General Ledger and Accounts payable data in a managed PeopleSoft enterprise software system and maintains employee benefit information in a managed system provided by workday company. "We have more than 50% of our business data stored in the cloud," said Douglas Menefee, chief information officer of the company. Those datasets consist of thousands of transaction information that needs to be processed daily, and the amount of data is very large. He predicts that by the end of the year, 75% of the company's business data will be kept in the cloud.

5. Does the use of cloud storage technology stop the need to equip internal technical resources?

Parascale's Maxey says the public cloud eliminates the need for servers and storage device administrators, but not all of the technical resource requirements have been dispensed with. Many of the public cloud storage technology services use newer networking protocols, such as WebDAV or rest. If a customer's internal application does not support those protocols, the technician needs to modify the software's code. Maxey said: "Otherwise, it will appear as if you are in a foreign country and language is not the case." ”

New applications developed according to specific patterns are easily adapted to the requirements of the storage cloud, he says, and older applications can be difficult to compare.

Source: Http://www.tuicool.com/articles/2iA7VjJ

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Five questions about cloud storage technology