The leading force in the cloud storage field

According to Gartner, about 19% of organizations are using cloud services in production calculations, and about 20% of organizations are using public cloud storage services. This means that the cloud computing market, especially the cloud storage market, is quite large. Gartner once made a forecast that in 2012, cloud computing spending amounted to $109 billion trillion, an increase of 20% per cent year-on-year.

Cloud computing is a big industry, and today many manufacturers are claiming to have a cloud strategy. Gartner recently released the top ten list of cloud storage vendors, which are basically able to provide some enterprise-class functionality. The following is a comprehensive introduction to the 10 cloud storage vendors, there are positive, there are negative, there are advantages, but also vulnerable.

Amazon Web Service (AWS)

Like many other aspects of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services can be considered the leader in the cloud storage market. It was an early player in the market and an enterprising player. The price of AWS can be said to be "industry reference points", Gartner said. Its simple storage service (S3) is a basic object store, while resilient block storage (EBS) is used to store volumes. AWS has also been innovating. Earlier last year, AWS released a long, low-cost document storage service, Glacier. And at a recent first user conference, AWS released Redshift, a cloud-based data warehousing service.

As Gartner points out, AWS faces many challenges. While it has a tool called AWS Storage Gateway that connects the enterprise's local data to the AWS Cloud, creating a hybrid storage architecture that spans both enterprise-local storage and the AWS Cloud is not easy, and most of the architecture is still under development. AWS is an innovative enterprise that continuously consolidates its existing market leadership by constantly introducing new products and services. Some of its services, such as the Govcloud (government cloud) service, are geared towards specific vertical industries, most notably the federal government agencies, which have the breadth and depth of cloud storage capabilities and services.

At&t

At&t's synaptic cloud storage services are closely linked to EMC's Atmos storage services, which are primarily used as local storage systems. It also gives At&t an opportunity to sell on EMC's strong customer base, leveraging a leading storage vendor to deliver mixed cloud capabilities to customers. Gartner believes that At&t's cloud storage services are focused on small and medium-sized enterprises. At&t claims that its cloud storage services have achieved double-digit growth, with more than billions of storage objects in the cloud. At&t synaptic has been distributed across several regions, and the next step is to expand into the European region. If the customer is already a at&t VPN business, the cost of data entry and exit can be exempted when using the company's cloud storage service.

Google Cloud storage

Google cloud storage, released in 2010, provides basic storage services for other cloud products and services, including Google App Engine (application development platform), Google Computing engine (cloud-based virtual machine) and bigquery (large data analysis tools). Customers access Google cloud storage via API, which is already available in Europe and America. However, Gartner points out that Google's cloud storage platform does not sell heavily and lacks support for corporate customers. This makes Google's cloud storage ideal for experienced customers who want to set up and manage cloud deployments, especially for developers looking for massive storage for Google apps.

hp

In May 2012, Hewlett-Packard announced that its cloud storage platform had entered the public test and would combine computing with CDN functions. The storage platform is based on OpenStack technology, and HP offers free 24/7 call support and a maximum of 99.95% availability guarantees. "In all OpenStack cloud storage vendors, HP is positioned to be precise and familiar with enterprise-class It storage requirements, thanks to its broad range of hardware and software and service offerings," Gartner said. However, since HP's Cloudobject storage is a new product, HP must develop and refine its architecture, geographic location, and service delivery. "HP's storage System can automatically replicate data in 3 usable areas for flexibility, and HP says it has the information that customers run on HP hardware in public and private clouds, making it easier to mix cloud settings."

IBM

IBM's cloud storage is part of its SmartCloud enterprise-class product, which also includes services such as cloud application development and infrastructure. Gartner believes that the biggest flaw in IBM cloud storage is the lack of integration between the various features of SmartCloud. IBM, for example, sells its cloud storage for backup and recovery, but these services do not use IBM's SmartCloud object storage at the back end. This may be due in part to IBM's partnership with Nirvanix, which uses IBM SmartCloud object storage. Gartner warns that these disparate services under the umbrella of IBM SmartCloud could lead to "islands of functionality" for services. But IBM has pledged to integrate its products and services more closely. IBM's large corporate sales advantage over the years has the potential to make it a major vendor in the big enterprise cloud storage market.

Internap

In the past, Internap has emerged as a manageable service and hosting provider, but it is now more of a cloud service vendor. Its agilefiles cloud storage system, based on the OpenStack Swift storage platform, has services in the United States, Europe and Asia and plans to expand to other regions. To differentiate its services, Internap also adds advanced networking capabilities for its services, such as the manager Internet Route Optimizer (MIRO), which analyzes the performance of the various possible routes of delivery and selects the best routes from them. Gartner says Internap's poor performance in the enterprise market is its biggest limitation.

Microsoft

Gartner predicts that Microsoft's Windows Azure BLOB storage may be the second most widely used cloud storage service after AWS. The service now has more than 1 trillion objects, an annual growth of 200%, and can support a wide range of storage capabilities, such as object storage, table storage, SQL Server, and CDN. Azure BLOB Storage is "racing to the bargain" with Amazon, and Google and Microsoft have been reducing service prices and offering more competitive prices over the past year. Microsoft also recently acquired the cloud storage gateway Vendor Storsimple, expanding its storage product line.

Nirvanix

As a pure cloud storage provider, Nirvanix only focuses on the market. Gartner says it is only looking for data-intensive storage requirements, but it is a disadvantage for customers looking for a one-stop service vendor, since the latter can provide computing services on storage platforms. Nirvanix's products have some features that attract customers, includes storage services that can be delivered across public, private, or mixed clouds, as well as a packaged monthly premium support option whose target customers are clearly corporate customers, but it is possible to miss SME customers, who may prefer discretionary pricing.

Rackspace

Rackspace is another major vendor in the cloud storage ecosystem, and its cloudfiles service includes a robust set of services, such as the computing infrastructure and CDN Network supported by Akamai. For high-performance storage requirements, it has cloudblock storage with high input and output capabilities. Rackspace's contribution to the OpenStack Open source project is enormous, and its services closely follow the pace of OpenStack development. Because its research and development are carried out in the OpenStack environment, Gartner believes that Rackspace's public cloud storage services can be well connected with OpenStack's private, creating mixed cloud services for customers.

Softlayer

SoftLayer's Cloudlayer object storage System is based on the OpenStack Swift platform and includes a range of other services provided by SoftLayer, such as computing and CDN. SoftLayer also offers SAN products that operate globally, with data centers located in Dallas, United States, and data centers in Amsterdam and Singapore. However, it lacks technical support and turnkey deployment services and has not been widely accepted by the enterprise market.