Research on the advantages of cloud storage technology and its development trend

Research on the advantages of cloud storage technology and its development trend

1. Introduction
In recent years, due to the development of information technology, scientific computing and commercial computing, and many other fields of application will produce a considerable scale of data, and the volume of data is still rapidly increasing, a large number of forms of development. In scientific computing, such as physics, astronomy, biology and other fields will produce large-scale data, and the annual data size to a number of PB. In terms of business computing, web search, social networking, and other data needs to be processed in a very large scale, for example, applications such as Google and Facebook generate petabytes of data or even EB levels. According to Moore's law, the speed of the processor is doubled every 18 months, and the development of optical fiber technology greatly accelerates the transmission speed of data on the network. However, the data access is limited by the mechanical movement of the storage medium, which makes the data access the main bottleneck restricting the development of information technology. Faced with the rapid expansion of data storage, businesses need to constantly acquire a large number of storage devices to cope with growing storage needs. However, this does not seem to solve the problem at all. First, the purchasing budget of storage devices is getting higher and larger, and most enterprises are unable to bear such huge expenses. A large number of heterogeneous physical storage resources greatly increase the complexity of storage management, which can lead to waste and inefficient utilization of storage resources. Nowadays, the rise of cloud computing technology enables efficient and low-cost cloud storage technology.
2. Cloud computing and cloud storage
(1) Cloud computing
The cloud is actually a metaphor for the internet and the Web. In the past, the cloud was often used to represent the telecommunications network, which was later used to represent the abstraction of the Internet and underlying infrastructure.
The definition of cloud computing is still quite abstract, so we can give some very simple examples. For example, we sometimes want to rely on computer software to do some work, and many of the software is charged, for users who do not often use the software to buy is very cost-effective. At this point, if we can provide all the software we need to rent, we only need to pay a small amount of "rent" to "rent" to these software services, we save a lot of money to buy hardware and software. As a result, the concept of cloud computing emerged. The ultimate goal of cloud computing is to make computing, services and applications available to the public as a public facility, enabling people to use computer resources like water, electricity and gas. In the cloud computing mode, the user's computer will be very simple, perhaps a little memory, no hard disk and a variety of application software, can meet our needs, because the user's computer in addition to the "cloud" through the browser to send instructions and accept the data is basically nothing to do can use the cloud service provider's computing resources, Storage space and a variety of application software. This is like connecting the "display" and "host" of wires infinitely long, into the network. The monitor is placed in front of the consumer, and the host is the cloud service provider's server cluster. In a cloud computing environment, users do not need to buy and have complex hardware and software, but only need to send money to the cloud service provider, you can buy equivalent services. This is cloud computing.
(2) Cloud storage
Cloud storage is a new concept that extends and develops in the concept of cloud computing, which refers to a system that combines many different types of storage devices in the network and works together to provide data storage and business access functions by using the functions of cluster application, grid technology or Distributed File system. Cloud storage is a cloud system that is the core of data storage and management, when the core of cloud computing system operation and processing is the storage and management of large amount of data, and the cloud computing system needs to configure a large number of storage devices.
Simply put, cloud storage is a new approach to putting storage resources on the cloud for people to access. Users can easily access data at any time, anywhere, by connecting to the cloud via any device that is connected to the network.
(3) The relationship between the two
First, cloud storage is stretched and developed on the basis of cloud computing. Second, compared to cloud computing, cloud storage is primarily a cloud-based system with large storage space, enabling different types of cloud storage operators to provide different services to businesses or individuals, and it is not subject to geographic limitations, unlimited scalability, and commercial components. Finally, in the structural model of cloud storage compared to one storage layer (mentioned later), but also a lot of data management and security related to the basic management functions, Access layer and application interface layer are identical, the enterprise into the cloud storage systems are: Enterprise Remote Data Backup, Enterprise space leasing, enterprise video surveillance.
3. Technology benefits of cloud storage
Today's traditional San or NAS has bottlenecks in capacity and performance expansion, which is not enough to meet the demands of high-performance, high-capacity, and scalable data storage in the new situation. With its low cost, large capacity and high bandwidth, the cloud computing service model not only makes it easy to break through the performance bottleneck of San, but also can realize linear scaling of performance and capacity. Compared with the traditional centralized storage, the cloud storage system has the following advantages.
(1) More easily expandable
Compared to traditional storage capacity expansion, the cloud storage architecture uses the parallel expansion mode, when the customer needs to increase capacity, can purchase the server according to demand, simple increase can realize the expansion of capacity: The new equipment only need to install the operating system and cloud storage software, open the power connected to the network, the cloud storage system can automatically identify, Automatically add capacity to the storage pool to complete the expansion. There is no limit to the expansion process.
(2) Easier to manage
In the past storage system management, managers need to face different storage devices, different vendors have different management interface devices, so that managers to understand the use of each storage (capacity, load, etc.) work complex and heavy. Moreover, the traditional storage in the hard disk or storage server corruption, may result in data loss, and cloud storage will not, if the hard drive is broken, the data will be automatically migrated to another hard disk, greatly reducing the workload of the management staff. For cloud storage, more storage servers, in the eyes of managers is only a memory, each storage server usage, through a unified management interface monitoring, make maintenance simple and easy to operate.
(3) Lower cost
Traditional storage System to the hard disk consistency requirements near harsh, must be the same as the factory card, the same capacity, the same model, or the system once the problem is difficult to solve. Moreover, in the face of the rapid upgrading of IT industry, hard disk after 2-3 years of use is difficult to find the same model product replacement. The use of cloud storage can avoid this problem, cloud storage system to storage devices, server equipment, hard disk and other product consistency is not required, different media, capacity, brand, model of hard disk, can work together, can realize the original hardware of the old protection input, but also to achieve new technology, the rapid update of equipment, reasonable collocation , optimal selection, sustainable development.
(4) More secure data and uninterrupted service
Traditional storage systems can cause services to stop because of system upgrades or hardware corruption. The cloud storage System is different, it can save the file and data in different storage nodes, avoid the system upgrade or hardware damage caused by the data is not available. The cloud storage system knows where the files are stored, and when the system is upgraded or the hardware is damaged, the cloud storage system automatically directs the read and write instructions to the files stored on the other storage server, keeps the service continuing, and the files are migrated back when the available storage servers are online.
4. Future Trends in cloud storage
Cloud storage has become a trend in future storage development. However, with the development of cloud storage technology, all kinds of applications, such as search, application technology and cloud storage, need to be improved from the aspects of security, portability and data access.
(1) Security
From the birth of cloud computing, security has always been one of the most important issues for enterprises to implement cloud computing. Also on cloud storage, security remains a top priority, and security is often the primary business and technical consideration for customers who want cloud storage. But many users ' security requirements for cloud storage are even higher than the level of security that their own architectures can provide. Even so, faced with such a high level of unrealistic security requirements, many large, trusted cloud storage vendors are also struggling to meet their requirements to build data centers that are much more secure than most enterprise data centers. Now users can see that cloud storage has fewer security vulnerabilities and a higher level of security, and cloud storage can provide more security than the user's own data center can provide.
(2) Portability
Some users also consider the portability of data when hosting storage. In general, this is guaranteed, and the solutions offered by some large service providers promise their data portability to rival the best traditional local storage. Some cloud storage combines powerful portability to deliver the entire data set to any medium you choose, even to a dedicated storage device.
(3) Performance and availability
Some of the past managed storage and Remote Storage always have a problem with too long latency. Similarly, the nature of the Internet itself is a serious threat to the availability of services. The latest generation of cloud storage has breakthrough achievements, reflected in the client or local device cache, to keep frequently used data locally, thus effectively alleviating internet latency issues. With local caches, these devices can mitigate latency issues even in the face of the most severe network outages. These devices can also allow frequently used data to react as quickly as local storage. With a local NAS gateway, cloud storage can even mimic the availability, performance, and visibility of your endpoint NAS devices while remotely protecting your data. As cloud storage technology continues to evolve, vendors will continue to strive for capacity optimization and WAN optimization to minimize the latency of data transmission.
(4) Data access
The existing doubts about cloud storage technology are that if you perform large-scale data requests or data recovery operations, cloud storage provides sufficient access. In the future technical conditions, this point can not worry, the existing manufacturers can transfer a large amount of data to any type of media, can transfer data directly to the enterprise, and its speed is equivalent to copy, paste operations. In addition, cloud storage vendors can provide a set of components that mimic cloud addresses on fully localized systems, allowing local NAS gateway devices to continue to function without having to reset. In the future, if large manufacturers build more regional facilities, data transfer will be faster. As a result, cloud storage vendors can quickly transfer data to customer data centers even if their local data is catastrophic.
5. Conclusion
In a strict sense, cloud storage is a service, not a storage. The core of cloud storage is the combination of storage device and application software to realize the transformation of storage device to storage service through application software. With the wide application of cloud computing and the maturing of technology, cloud storage technology is bound to get great progress and development, potential huge storage demand and market, cloud storage technology will still be the most popular it area.

The source of this article: The Age of Science

Research on the advantages of cloud storage technology and its development trend