The present situation of cost crisis in service-type storage market

Disk storage has become one of the largest sources of expenditure in the datacenter, with the cost of existing arrays increasing, and IDC expects the enterprise storage infrastructure to grow by 300% in 10 years. In this case, more and more people are worried that companies will fall into the huge cost of storing data.

Access to the cloud SNA storage infrastructure avoids the difficult situation that IDC envisions in its "Exploding Data Universe" report. Cloud storage vendors have come up with a number of scenarios for reducing capacity costs, reducing the labor required for storage management and maintenance, and preparing capacity in the most cost-effective manner, although they have not yet been validated, but they have been the focus of various enterprise users.

For senior people in the storage industry, cloud storage is not a completely new paradigm. The core concept of cloud storage comes from the service computing paradigm developed by IBM and other vendors in the 70 's, Sun's "network as a computer" concept, and the application service providers and storage service providers of the last century of the 90.

What's the difference? Of course, the economy is different. Because of the high cost of preparing storage and the increasing cost of many IT departments, users have a strong interest in alternatives. Service-type storage vendors claim they can mitigate the burden of storage management, reduce customer costs associated with hardware upgrades, and reduce the total cost of customers. If cloud vendors can achieve economies of scale through storage capacity pools, the price of cloud storage will be reduced to a lower cost than if the enterprise uses its own storage resources.

Previous generations of applications and storage service providers have come up with similar ideas, but they have encountered many problems, including the cost of networking between users and application services, customer concerns about sharing infrastructure with other businesses, and so on. Once customers begin to require the use of physical components to provide their services, ASPs and SSP have to destroy their economies of scale and provide the infrastructure for each customer.

Cloud storage vendors say they have overcome those hurdles. Network connectivity is faster, cheaper, and more secure than ever before, and enterprise data centers are using virtualization technology to provide users with a separate storage environment that minimizes user concerns about data security and the need for dedicated infrastructure.

Cloud storage experts point to the high cost of storing data for business needs or for compliance reasons, but they have never been duplicated by the enterprise. The data, they say, is well suited for storage in the cloud, freeing up the storage that businesses now use to store primary or real-time data. The idea is valuable, and it is likely to become a curse that the cloud is a cheap storage space for compliance and archived data.

Yet providing such services is a double-edged sword for cloud providers. To address compliance issues, including compliance with different confidentiality laws in different regions, cloud storage vendors must establish multiple data centers, where operational processes, auditing standards, and certifications vary. This is not a small problem, and may soon be able to distinguish the order of the Izumo in the field of storage services.