Today's evolving cloud storage technologies and products

In the past few years, the choice of cloud storage has changed a lot, and there are many use cases. A few years ago, developers used it primarily in the data warehouses of some projects, and traditional IT teams in multinational companies are now focused on the needs of their production systems, which are cloud-oriented. From this change, we can see the development direction and time stage of cloud storage technology.

In Jeffbyrne's latest Storage magazine column, you can learn about the three main technologies behind cloud-driven technology and the two core components of cloud storage: data content and I/O. While Jeffbyrne cannot be sure what technology will be most successful, it is confident that the growing cloud market will mix the technology of various data storage vendors.

The cloud storage market is just beginning to take off. In the past few years, cloud storage has been a major concern for developers, who believe that cloud storage is a cost-effective way to provide the resources on demand for a particular project's data store. But now we are discovering that the cloud is more used by traditional it for new storage-related applications. Through communication with suppliers and users, we believe that 2011 will be a year of medium-and enterprise-level it moving to the cloud storage agenda, and will gradually adopt a variety of cloud storage technologies.

The transformation from the development environment to the actual production system is a major factor in the formation of a huge market for cloud storage products, and the Taneja group commented that "the market outlook for cloud storage is very large". Based on the survey, the cloud storage product market has now reached 4 billion U.S. dollars, and in 2014 may reach 10 billion U.S. dollars. Cloud computing will largely affect the next generation of data storage technologies, including how and where they are deployed.

To understand the direction of the cloud storage market, first understand the two areas of the market: supporting the primary storage technology behind cloud technology, and connecting technologies that enable users, systems, and applications to connect to the cloud. The vast majority of vendors in the first wave of cloud technology are focused on the latter, so let's start with this:

Cloud Connection Technology

We find that there are three main types of technologies connected to the cloud:

Universal Gateway Technology. With the growing popularity of public and private clouds, users need to access their cloud storage faster and more cost-effectively. There are several ways to improve access speed, including common gateways. Users connect data content and primary I/O storage through a common gateway. Suppliers such as Nasuni and twinstrata have introduced such products. Although still limited today, this part of the business is expected to grow by 100% in 2014.

Cloud based backup technology. Another type of access technology has prompted the rise of cloud backup, which allows users to transfer backup data to the cloud via a connection. A number of suppliers, such as CommVault, riverbed technology (product Whitewater) and Symantec Inc., provide the solutions. This area has grown rapidly, although not as common Gateway technology has grown twice times per year.

Data migration access. Receiving the impact of the growing virtual machine market, applications and data storage must overcome long distances, data migrations, and connectivity access products that play an increasingly important role in effectively migrating large amounts of information and interacting with cloud data. Cisco, Juniper Network and riverbed (product steelhead) are the main players in this field. Especially riverbed is the leader of this market. They have focused on distributed markets and are now focused on distributing new ways of linking.

New primary storage mode under cloud architecture

The primary storage based on cloud technology, more traditional storage vendors, including those super large vendors, bring a new change in the market to provide their products and technologies in a new way of storage.

We divide the primary storage technology in the cloud technology context into two main parts: content and I/O.

Content is quite different from traditional I/O storage in data retention, access, and distribution. In the traditional typical infrastructure, file technology is the prerequisite for content preservation, while in the cloud environment there is no longer extensibility and accessibility to service content. On the contrary, the content on the cloud is supported by different technologies on each object, making content and archive storage rapidly evolving in terms of high scalability, multi-user, network-based access, and so on. The market will be driven primarily by service providers in the short term, but it will eventually be widely used in the corporate private cloud. We can expect such companies as DataDirect networks (products for Webobjectscaler), Nirvanix (products for Hnode) and Mezeo (product for Cloudstorageplatform) and EMC, Key storage platform providers such as HP and NetApp work together on the cloud storage market. This is going to be a very big market, though not as big as the cloud-connected markets we mentioned above.

Let's look at the biggest part of the cloud storage market: Supporting the I/O market behind the cloud architecture. The market is now over 2 billion dollars in size. Although the same storage product has a niche in the market, the next generation of optical fiber technology is being used gradually. We believe that the main I/O storage will have a new place in the background of cloud technology, which is also the driver of the intelligent data block technology. Smart data blocks can quickly replace existing systems with proprietary cloud or public cloud storage architectures, and will be the fittest for existing storage-system vendors. We believe that Dell (EqualLogic), Hp/3par, and NetApp will be the winners in the cloud-era primary I/O storage vendors. Especially HP's 3PAR platform. 3PAR has always been the innovator of storage resources in service providers and enterprise applications, and there are some unique business processes currently under Cloudagile.

Cloud: A new battle battlefield

While it is too early to talk about who wins in the new technology race, we can be sure that the rapidly growing cloud market will shuffle the pattern of current data-store vendors. The winners in this competition will gain access to highly scalable multi-purpose storage and win markets by providing accurate business models on accurate platforms.