Challege Cloud storage: Do not blindly migrate primary storage to the cloud

At a recent Gigaom meeting, the storage vendors said that before the cloud "settles" for primary storage, we needed to fix a problem: storage technology and pricing patterns needed to change.

The team, which includes executives from NetApp and three other start-ups, agreed that current cloud storage is better suited for backup and recovery. However, a significant portion of the new companies are doing well in the cloud storage business model, which can "pave the road" for primary storage on the cloud.

Vanessa Alvarez, a Forrester analyst, chaired the team, saying that for cloud storage, the good news is that customer interest is increasing. According to Forrester's 2010-year survey, about 28% of respondents said they were interested in cloud storage, 10% per cent higher than the previous year.

The bad news, though, is that the respondents focused on the backup and recovery of the cloud, not the primary storage.

Andres Rodriguez, founder and CEO of Nasuni, a Third-party backup and archiving virtual device developer, said (primary storage cloud) is important for the close integration of storage and computing layers.

Currently, customers ' investments in cloud storage are shrinking, considering performance and security issues, Rodriguez said. Therefore, he says, for many customers, migrating a cloud to a data center is better than migrating the datacenter to the cloud.

"IT departments are still unwilling to migrate primary storage to the cloud," said Val Bercovici, senior director of NetApp's CTO office.

However, Bercovici also said that migrating data backups to the cloud provides it with an opportunity to increase data value, such as reducing storage costs. "Backup and business continuity can easily rely on the cloud to gain added value." "he said.

Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of Nutanix (computing and storage resource consolidation virtualization start-ups), says the problem with running primary storage data in the cloud now is how the application works. Nutanix is planning to sneak up on the VMworld meeting next month.

For the readers of the bit network, it is very difficult to run an application such as Exchange or SharePoint on the cloud, which is primarily a matter of metadata access. "If metadata is added to the cloud, the speed of 200ms access is certainly too slow," Pandey said. ”

Dave Wright, chief executive of Solidfire, a cloud-solid primary storage start-up that was secretly "surfacing" this week, said that breaking the link between physical servers and storage was highly unrealistic, largely due to the speed of physical data access.

At the moment, Wright says, we have millions of virtual servers on the cloud, all of them with their own storage, but these are not the performance requirements for applications such as SharePoint and Exchange that run in the cloud.

For this industry, Bercovici says, there is an urgent need to move away from traditional thinking about block and file storage to the new storage technology with Multi-image.

"No one is going to run Oracle on the cloud, but they are running apps from companies such as Box.net (cloud-based file sharing and management vendors, who have the development model to introduce storage into the cloud)." "he said.

If users want to run these applications in the cloud, they need service providers to start using new technologies, such as solid-state drives, to meet the required performance, Wright said. At the same time, he says, service providers ' user-facing billing benchmarks should not only depend on the user's storage capacity, but should also compute the combined capacity and performance values.

"This will allow service providers to apply SLAs (Service level agreements) in cloud storage," Wright said. ”

In the enterprise market, solid-state drives are still considered to be very expensive products, especially expensive SLC (single unit) flash products, compared to traditional hard drives. However, Wright said that by using a cheaper MLC (multistage unit) SSD, the cost per GB hard drive would enable service providers to deliver the promised performance levels.

Performance commitments from service providers will help drive the development of primary storage in the cloud, Wright said. "This will make users feel more comfortable with the technology." "They can't even get that feeling from their own infrastructure," he said. ”

At the same time, service providers need to consider storing the storage on the cloud's ecological environment at the very beginning of the project. Pandey that most suppliers have not yet done so.

Pandey cites a recent event to illustrate his view that, thanks to Amazon's S3 offensive, Iron Kings recently exited the public cloud storage market for less than a year. Big vendors like Amazon, he says, have collaborated with NetApp companies before they started to consider using different technologies to create products of different prices.

Another issue, Rodriguez says, is the ability of companies to sell cloud storage, and how to ensure that their salespeople are not only selling storage capacity, but also providing a full range of services that include complete solutions.

"Storage services and a complete solution can guarantee you a 60-point profit and can be left to channel 30 points." "he said.