Storage has ushered in the era of cloud computing

Now that the concept of "cloud computing" is not only vague and somewhat hyped, but many storage vendors are rushing to launch their own cloud computing products, users are also considering whether cloud computing can bring them significant cost savings, especially in the current downturn.

The recent SNW conference tracking report shows that the cloud is "an upgrade strategy that provides users with transparent IT services through a shared architecture of system and service resource pools." Cloud "provides a ' no resistance economy ' by lowering the threshold and avoiding punishment. It is a way to provide unlimited resources, the necessary tools to meet requirements, and a cost-effective way to expand, although there are some problems with existing architectures, manageability, and security.

Surprisingly, Gartner believes that the amorphous nature of cloud computing is good news: "The confusion and contradictions in cloud computing mean that the technology has the potential to change the status quo in the IT market." Gartner defines cloud computing as a computing model in which large scalable it capabilities are provided to multiple external users as a service via internet technology. ”

Illuminata Chief IT consultant John Webster advises users to "think of the cloud as the Internet that provides services and compute resources."

Oddly, the storage vendors developed some early cloud services, but only decades later realized internet-based storage.

"In any case, the application store is migrated to some ' ethereal ' cloud," says Webster. There are many ways to access these stores, either as external services or as clouds created within your corporate firewall. ”

Private Cloud

Parascale's Sajai Krishnan compares this service to Car rentals: "Your business needs more storage, and cloud storage is like a car." You can ' lease ' cloud storage as a public cloud's external service, or ' buy ' cloud storage as a private cloud within the corporate firewall. ”

The external cloud environment provided by vendors such as Amazon, Google, or EMC Mozy allows businesses to quickly access such Internet storage without having to invest any money. This service provides a number of benefits for businesses that want to balance the application and the maintenance of spending needed to help businesses grow.

Companies may have security issues when migrating internal data to these external clouds, so many businesses are looking at private cloud architectures based on the Internet or on the intranet. This internal cloud architecture provides specialized design and control, but often requires more server and storage overhead. Now, however, some vendors have launched an affordable cloud storage solution.

Parascale, for example, has launched a new software product that enterprise users use to create a cluster of hundreds of servers using the data center's existing server hardware. These servers serve as a large file base to meet the storage capacity and parallel throughput requirements of different applications.

According to Krishnan, Parascale's strategy is to get users to use common servers or existing server devices in the data center that they can buy. "We offer a way to use software to aggregate or split these hardware, which looks a bit like a large storage application, actually a cloud storage," he said. This easy self-management application is actually a resource that can be accessed through a network, whether it is an intranet service or an Internet service like Amazon. ”

The characteristics of this asset reuse are considered to be one of the main advantages of the private cloud. Krishnan suggests that the best time for an enterprise to create an internal cloud architecture is when you have 20T~30TB data and the annual data growth rate is around 25%. Organizations can create an internal cloud environment that leverages servers that have not been fully utilized for many years, or that are still under warranty but are not being used for virtualized projects.

Security and compliance issues

The nature of information data (e-mail, database, transaction data) determines that cloud storage is not available for first-level, mission-critical data, but private clouds can be used as a storage pool for enterprise backup and data archiving. Cloud storage is also used to hold static data generated by digital content, video monitoring, or streaming media.

The internal cloud also offers a number of benefits to users who care about security issues, and tends to make it easier for specialized people to manage data over the intranet rather than over the Internet.

In particular, with the introduction of new regulations such as the Federal Rules of the Civil Procedure (Libertarians PROCEDURE,FRCP), the use of cloud storage in a highly redundant manner ensures that enough copies are kept under established policies. And this approach can also reduce the cost of human resources, transfer this part of the resources to data classification and cataloging.

However, security experts point out that the best security policy for encryption and key management and the common storage security policy apply to data that migrates to any one of the cloud architectures. As SNIa in storage security best practices technical proposal, enterprise organizations should "determine the appropriate service level objectives for virtual storage: 1" to meet the availability goals of the ' storage cloud ' for application requirements; 2 Satisfies the ' storage cloud ' requirements for the confidentiality and privacy of storage information types. ”

Organizations should also check their storage processes and retention processes for future data tracking related to electronic discovery requirements. If businesses are already having trouble searching for data, cloud computing may complicate the problem. FRCP requirements for backup and disaster recovery replicas may also involve external cloud storage or third-party storage.

Webster says the cloud is a highly attractive service model in terms of cost and expense. He suggests that corporate institutions should find someone who understands their storage and security needs and can address those needs. If businesses can get cheap computing services, they might opt for external cloud services, and they might choose an internal cloud architecture once they know how to reduce infrastructure costs. Remember that cloud storage is not a replacement for the current architecture, but rather a storage option that provides additional costs and benefits.