Early users said: Cloud storage can save costs

Developing a cloud storage strategy can be complex and requires high security. However, from the early user experience, the real advantage of cloud storage is that it saves users money. Analysts say cloud-based services can save IT expenses because cloud computing uses a shared infrastructure and transforms costs from capital to operational costs.

At the same time, competition will drive costs down even further, especially for larger users. Amazon, for example, said that with a total storage volume of over 50TB, the monthly cost per GB dropped from 15 cents to 12 cents, and in June its data transfer costs dropped to 3 cents per GB.

An early user, Peter Hedlund, a programmer at Encyclopedia Virginia in Virginia, said he was interested in cloud storage because he could get a forecast price from Zetta, a cloud storage service provider in Sunnyvale.

Encyclopedia Virginia stores the master data in the system at the University of Virginia master data center by establishing affiliation with its parent company, but there it is, as Hedlund puts it, "we're just a small fish in the big river," so quickly adding storage The amount is hard and he can not even get the exact university charge for storage. Zetta quotes 25 cents per GB per month, and Hedlund said "it's reasonable." Now Hedlund can not only calculate the current required storage capacity, but also make accurate budgets.

However, he added, "At this point we should not consider using Zetta as the primary storage." He believes the true value of cloud storage for Encyclopedia Virginia is like a low-cost archiving system that can store endless Image, audio and video files. Hedlund asked: "I want to know where else can we store this data?"

Cloudize is a collaborative service company that uses cloud storage from Nirvanix. The new company in San Francisco has the same cloud storage price as Encyclopedia Virginia - at 25 cents a month, Edwin Fu, chief executive of Cloudize, said the price is ideal for planning and budgeting. And he also likes this: Nirvanix supports this price for online storage throughout the company, not on a per-user basis.

Fu says the traditional services provided by companies such as Rackspace Hosting are too costly for Cloudize.

Build Private Cloud: Get data closer to home

Nick Bali, a senior software engineer at Sony Pictures Imageworks, is investigating the possibility of using ParaScale's software to build a private cloud. His plan was to create a structure that would control the product environment, which would require up to 3,000 servers per product to run 50TB to 100TB of data.

Bali said data can not be placed in the public cloud due to response time, and the benefits of cloud technology, especially low-cost components, virtualization, capacity expansion, and simple pay-as-you-go protocols, make it a Way is suitable for Sony company.

According to CIO Joy Grosser, another user, the Iowa Health System, stored mission-critical image data on a private cloud, managed by software from Bycast. She said more than 10,000 users are trying to get files from cloud storage systems that connect over private networks.

Choosing is a good thing, but the dazzling selection and pricing of cloud storage arrays is shrinking. For example, Amazon S3-based storage stores cost 15 cents a GB per month for enterprises to afford, and for cloud applications they can get S3 capacity through third-party services that provide more granular data management tools at a price of 25 cents per GB per month.

On-demand billing costs can also be negotiated directly with the cloud storage provider. Or, with private software, users can configure a private cloud behind a firewall for about the same cost as configuring a standard storage area network (SAN) because users' own hardware and software are also being used. Another option is that users can adopt a hybrid configuration that puts some data in the public cloud and others in its own data center. The cost of this approach depends on how you allocate storage.

Core vendors have also entered the space, with AT & T, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun both releasing new online storage, most of them just starting out. But when they finally get up, the price is expected to be higher than the price of Amazon. But big companies will also provide better service level agreements, management and resources.

Mike Feinberg, EMC senior vice president, said: "Our focus is PB, not TB."

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