Is your primary data store suitable for cloud storage?

In the face of cloud computing and the agitation of cloud storage vendors, should SMEs take the cloud as primary storage? This article will focus on this issue.





the reason for denying Cloud storage services





the most controversial issue with cloud storage as primary storage is the loss of application performance. Application can be highly sensitive to the response time of storage: The longer the response time to a read or write request is stored, the slower it will run. Slower application performance will lead to a significant decrease in employee productivity.





years ago, IBM did a research on user productivity and published a report called the economic value of fast response time. The report calculates the impact of response time on user productivity. The report found that people's sensitivity to the speed of application responses could be as accurate as 0.5 seconds, and that user productivity would increase dramatically when application response time was reduced from 3 seconds to 0.3 seconds.





Public cloud storage is defined geographically from your physical storage (in terms of the length of the network path between each other). The response time of the application is measured by round-trip time (round-trip Time,rtt), which is the time it will take to send a read and write request from the cloud store to receive feedback. There are many factors affecting RTT, and one of the unavoidable is the delay of transmission line. Another factor is the latency caused by TCP/IP (Internet Standard protocol). In addition, packet loss can cause a rise in response time, as this means a retransmission of message packets. At this point, it can be seen that for most of the major applications of small and medium-sized enterprises, the performance of public cloud storage is unacceptable, even the simple job of reading and writing Microsoft Office files will make the staff crazy.





so far, you should be aware of why cloud storage is not yet a primary storage for small and medium-sized enterprises. Now we're going to talk about when will cloud storage really show up in the SME market?





when does cloud storage have practical value?





If an SME uses cloud computing services such as Google Docs, Microsoft Office 365, and Salesforce.com, it is appropriate to have the data for these applications in cloud storage. In this case, the stored data and applications are coordinated, and the response time between them is the same as they are in the enterprise local, the most critical thing becomes the cloud application and enterprise user response time, and cloud storage is not the whole system bottleneck. Therefore, if the performance of cloud applications is acceptable, then cloud storage will not be the problem.





This concludes that if cloud storage matches the application it is associated with, it is feasible as the primary storage for the enterprise. Otherwise, the application performance of lag will cause cloud storage to be difficult to put into practice in the SME environment.