Five key issues in parsing cloud storage

At present, vendors are in a period of what a vendor calls a "training model", explaining to corporate CIOs, IT managers, and other it buyers that saving their data in a public or private cloud can save a lot of cost.

There seems to have been a consensus that cloud storage will eventually flourish. After all, it is technically feasible, cheaper than traditional data storage, and more secure.

"I think cloud promotion is a bit like a 10-year-old Linux extension and it's not going to happen overnight," said John Engates, chief technology officer at San Antonio's Rackspace Hosting Inc. It is gradual. The system administrator or developer will quietly bring the Linux apps that they developed on weekends to the company and then show them to the people in Monday. People realize that this is a credible way to take a certain amount of time. ”

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

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

100 people have 100 different answers to this question. In essence, cloud storage is a utility service that provides a shared storage pool for many users to access through 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-go storage service. All of its components are outside the customer's firewall, and the shared infrastructure is separated from each other and accessed through secure network connections.

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

The cloud storage service provider manages the storage infrastructure and builds 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, requiring all or authorized hardware and software from that company. All enterprise data is kept within the company and controlled entirely by internal IT staff. Those employees can build storage capacity into a storage pool for use by departments within the company or different groups of projects.

As with public clouds, private clouds can easily and quickly increase storage pool capacity by adding servers to storage pools. Parascale's cloud storage and Caringo Castor are two 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, the software configuration business, the storage management and support business, and the data center business." You still need to be equipped with all these resources. ”

There is only one exception. The customer does not need to be equipped with these resources when the private storage cloud is established and used exclusively by a particular customer in a way that is partitioned from the public storage cloud. Such users would have to pay higher fees, just as they would pay higher fees to use a special ward in a hospital.

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

"If you're connecting over a WAN and sharing resources with other customers, it's a public cloud," Maxey explains. This is useful for businesses that are widely distributed, developing software without sharing the infrastructure. This public cloud is also useful if you need to send instantaneous data such as movie trailers. Temporary storage in a public cloud is useful. ”