Let the clouds obscure your judgment.

Everything is "cloudy" recently. Every day there will be new players to join the cloud game. Existing data storage vendors are "cloud" their products. Some of them really agree with the concept of cloud, while others have shoved their products into the cloud concept because they think they will lose their IT users ' favor if they don't.

However, the questions I have been asked most by it users are the following:

Our core IT departments support several 1788.html ">" branches, each with its own IT department. One branch decided to sign up to Amazon Network Service (http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/14152.html ">amazon Web Services") and transfer some data to S3 storage. The managers of another branch talked to Nirvanix or Rackspace or at&t synaptic and sent them the company's data. What are we going to do? We don't want to stifle innovation, but we feel we have lost control.

As well as ...

Our storage vendors are asking us to create a private cloud with a product that is almost the same as the previous one, plus a federated product. Has the technology to implement the private cloud matured?

Here is my point of view. Whether you like it or not, the cloud has appeared. This is much like the storage virtualization we saw in 2000. I feel that this concept has so many advantages, it will certainly appear, but it takes more time to appear than imagined. This is the reality of it. Even if a technology that will change everything is coming, it will take a long time to get into actual use. Clouds are similar. Properly implemented, it should improve storage utilization while allowing you to expand and scale at will. You can pay for growth and enjoy an easy-to-use storage system. So the question is not why, but when and how.

Follow the clouds.

My first suggestion is not to resist the cloud. You need to understand what the cloud is, what is true and what is not, who is leading the game and so on, according to the company's own expertise. Next, you will want to use less important data to experiment with the public cloud. You can try the water and test how scalability works, how the service provides security, whether the data transfer rate is reasonable, and so on. You'll also want to try to recover the files, the entire volume, and more. These tests should help you develop guidance that you can provide to business units, define which data can or cannot be sent outside the company, and how to manage it. This keeps the enterprise consistent while ensuring that innovation on the cloud goes smoothly.

Perhaps the easiest way to get into the game is to use a gateway product as a ramp into the cloud. You should avoid writing cloud interface code yourself, even if you are familiar with the Web Services API provided by most cloud service providers. Those gateway product providers have completed these jobs and provided a standard interface (via NFS, CIFS, ISCSI, Fibre Channel) to interact with existing applications, while adapting the different styles of each public cloud in the background. Suppliers in this area include Cirtas, mimecast (email archive), Iron Kings, Liveoffice, Nasuni, Nirvanix, Storsimple, Twinstrata, Zetta, and other companies.

Create your own cloud

If you want to create a private cloud, look at what your primary storage provider is planning. Vendors are at different stages of product development and supply capabilities. EMC appears to be in the lead, has released Vplex and started supplying, an important alliance technology that is critical in building large clouds. But all major storage vendors have serious plans to provide private cloud storage products and services. Unsurprisingly, everyone wants to build your private cloud with almost all their own products, but in my opinion, no one in the market has all the necessary parts.

You can consider alternative options. Nirvanix, for example, create what they call Hnode, or a hybrid node (hybrid nodes). Basically, it allows you to create a private cloud with the same software that Nirvanix uses on its own storage Deployment network (Storage IBuySpy network-sdn), allowing your private cloud to interoperate with a public cloud based on the Nirvanix architecture.

Long term consideration

Whichever path you decide to take, remember that this is one of the biggest decisions you will make. Once you sign a contract with a supplier, you may be locked out for a long time.

Suppliers are now in the learning phase, just like us. So take the time to learn and experiment, and then go on the road.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)