From concept to reality, talk about cloud storage development prospects

Although there have been cloud storage products launched by EMC, HP, Huawei Symantec, 3PAR and other companies in the market, there is not a completely unified definition of the concept of cloud storage. Some even said that only the cloud The concept of computing without the concept of cloud storage. Tad Lebeck, CTO of Huawei Symantec Technologies Co., Ltd., said: "The key point of cloud storage is not the hardware architecture, but rather the service delivery in what form. Users only pay attention to and enjoy the convenience brought by cloud storage, Fast service, and will not care about the underlying hardware architecture is exactly what the data will be stored where the most prominent feature of the cloud storage service can be used with pay, such as Amazon, Google and other IT companies have introduced the relevant Storage services in today's environment, to explore the integration of storage and security is more practical significance. "

How fast is the province?

Cloud computing, cloud storage, cloud services and other cloud models generated by the global financial crisis provide a more cost-effective way to solve the problem of business users purchasing and using IT resources, just to meet the needs of enterprise cost control during the economic downturn The demand. The OceanStor T3000, a cloud storage product launched by Huawei Symantec, advocates low cost, easy management, and energy saving.

In the cloud computing center, expensive high-end storage systems are no longer the only core of cloud storage architectures. Cloud storage architecture must be a hierarchical storage architecture. Data is reasonably stored in high, medium and low-end storage systems according to its importance in life cycle. Although unstructured data such as video and audio are growing rapidly, they are less important in terms of importance than business-critical data, so they do not necessarily need to be stored on high-end storage systems, and mid-tier and low-end storage systems now assume more More responsibility. Tad Lebeck said. "Although the global financial crisis will not cause the storage market to shrink substantially, the storage, purchasing and consumption habits of users may change.Controlling the cost has become a top priority.Many users of SMEs will be more cautious in making IT investments and press Payments for the actual usage may become popular, just as the concept of cloud storage fits. "

Some vendors claim to have only two dollars per GB of storage capacity when it comes to cloud storage products. Tad Lebeck said: "Low-cost cloud storage is a basic feature.But for users, not only to pay attention to the cost of hardware equipment, but also pay attention to the future operation and maintenance of the system and management costs, the cost of this part of the total cost of ownership of the system Of Huawei's 70% Huawei Symantec's cloud-optimized storage product combines Huawei's hardware with Symantec's software and adopts a modular design that takes performance and capacity into account, expanding as needed, Point of view, at least 10% -20% lower than the competition. "Cloud storage is very large scale, so more emphasis on improving energy efficiency and reduce energy consumption. Take OceanStor T3000 as an example, it adopts S3 standby hibernation mode, which can support standby hibernation and automatic wake-up of the whole system. Its hard disk slow start-up design can control the start-up current and reduce the overall power consumption of the system. Tad Lebeck said: "Low cost, easy management and energy savings are three typical characteristics of cloud-optimized storage, and cloud storage should have good redundancy to ensure continuous system downtime and downtime. Importantly, cloud storage should be serviceable and provide users access to data anytime, anywhere. "

Technology is not an obstacle

Cloud storage is a big market, there can not be only one or several suppliers, but rather a complete ecosystem, including cloud equipment, cloud software, cloud services and other suppliers. Only these suppliers are organically integrated to provide users with truly accessible cloud services. Huawei Symantec highlighted the openness and good compatibility of the product when it introduced the first generation of cloud-optimized storage product OceanStor T3000. T3000 compatible with the existing mainstream open operating system and the mainstream distributed file system, while full open API to customers, and can be customized to meet the user's application development needs to optimize open and simplify management.

The Forbes magazine article states that cloud computing is a relatively new concept, but in fact its origins can be traced back to the beginning of the Internet. From the current situation, the most revolutionary concept of cloud computing is not in itself, but many of the conditions associated with it. As these conditions mature, cloud computing will gradually become an inevitable choice and trend in the process of economic development. Tad Lebeck said: "The cloud camp is in a constant state of flux, and Microsoft, Google, EMC, IBM, and others explain the benefits that the cloud brings to us and how we can change our lives." As the major cloud in China, Storage solutions provider, Huawei Symantec is committed to working with cloud services, cloud devices and cloud software providers to carry out extensive cooperation to jointly promote the development of cloud computing. "

How far away from the concept of cloud storage to practical application? Tad Lebeck said technology is not the major obstacle. The cloud-optimized storage OceanStor T3000 and the clustered NAS product OceanStor N8000 introduced by Huawei Symantec are examples. Cloud storage is moving toward more technology and lower cost. The key to the popularity of cloud storage lies in how to deploy and apply it to find the most appropriate business model.

Gartner ranks the top five of the most revolutionary technologies for multicore processors, cloud computing, user interfaces, social networking / social software and web mashups and expects these revolutionary technologies to reshape the IT industry by 2008-2012. Although cloud computing is unlikely to become widespread in a short period of time, cloud computing will change the traditional computing and storage architecture to bring innovative service models. Cloud computing does have the ability to change the IT industry.