What are the current cloud storage technologies and products that are evolving today?

In the past few years, the development of cloud computing can be described as unprecedented, cloud storage options have undergone great changes. A few years ago, cloud storage was just being put in the data warehouses of some projects by developers, and traditional IT teams across multinational corporations are now focusing on the needs of their production systems and cloud-oriented. This shift allows us to see the cloud storage technology development direction and time stage.

In Jeff Byrne's latest Storage Magazine column, we learned about the three main technologies that drive cloud technology and the two core elements of cloud storage: data content and I / O. While Jeff Byrne does not guarantee that those technologies will be the most successful, one thing is still quite confident that the technology for various data storage vendors will be mixed in a growing cloud market.

Cloud storage market has just begun to take steps. In the past few years, cloud storage was the area of ​​greatest concern to all developers, who saw cloud storage as a cost-effective way to provide on-demand resources for a particular project's data store. But now we are discovering that cloud is being used more by traditional IT for new storage-related applications. Through the exchange with suppliers and users, we believe that 2011 will be a year for medium-sized and enterprise IT to the cloud storage agenda and gradually adopt various cloud storage technologies.

The transition from a development environment to an actual production system is a major factor in creating a huge market for cloud storage products, commented Taneja, "There is a huge market for cloud storage." Based on the survey, the cloud storage product market has now reached 4 billion US dollars, and in 2014 may reach 10 billion US dollars. Cloud computing will largely impact the next generation of data storage technologies, including how and where they are deployed.

To understand the direction of the cloud storage market, we must first understand two areas of the market: the primary storage technology behind the cloud; and the connectivity technologies that connect users, systems, and applications to the cloud. The first wave of cloud technology in the vast majority of suppliers are concerned about the latter, so we start from this part:

Cloud Connection Technology

We found that there are three main types of technologies that connect to the cloud:

General gateway technology. As public and private clouds become more pervasive, users need faster and more cost-effective access to their cloud storage. There are several ways to improve access speed, including common gateways. Users connect to data content and primary I / O storage via a common gateway. Suppliers such as Nasuni and TwinStrata have introduced such products. Although still limited in size 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 backups that allow users to transfer backup data over the connection to the cloud. Some vendors, such as CommVault, Riverbed Technologies, which markets Whitewater, and Symantec, both offer solutions. This area is growing rapidly, though not as much as twice as much as the common gateway technology.

Data Migration Access. Receiving the impact of a growing virtual machine market, applications and data stores must overcome long-haul, data migrations and connected access products to play an increasingly important role in effectively migrating vast amounts of information and interacting with cloud data. Cisco, Juniper Networks and Riverbed (product Steelhead) are major players in this space. In particular, Riverbed is the leader in this market. Their previous focus on the distributed market, and now is more committed to the distribution of new links on the way.

New main storage model under cloud architecture

Cloud-based primary storage brings a whole new twist to the market over traditional storage vendors, including those from the super-large, to deliver their products and technologies in new storage. We divide the main storage technology in the cloud technology into two main parts: content and I / O.

Content is much different from traditional I / O-based storage in terms of data retention, access, and distribution. In the traditional typical infrastructure, file technology is the premise of content preservation, but in the cloud environment there is no longer the scalability and accessibility of service content. Conversely, content on the cloud is backed by different technologies on each object, making content and archive storage grow rapidly with high levels of scalability, multi-user access, web-based access, and more. This market will be dominated by service providers in the near term, but eventually it will be widely used in the enterprise private cloud. We can look forward to working with companies such as DataDirect Network (Web Object Scaler), Nirvanix (hNode) and Mezeo (Cloud Storage Platform) and major storage platform providers such as EMC, HP and NetApp in the cloud storage market . This will be a very large market, though not as big as the cloud-connected market we mentioned above.

Let us look at the largest part of the cloud storage market: supporting the I / O market behind the cloud architecture. The current size of this market has more than 2 billion US dollars. Although the same storage product has a place in the market, next-generation optical fiber technology is being applied gradually. We believe that primary I / O storage will have new uses in the context of cloud technology, which is also driven by smart data block technology. Intelligent data blocks can quickly replace existing systems with private cloud or public cloud storage architectures, and existing storage system vendors will survive. We believe Dell (EqualLogic), HP / 3PAR, and NetApp will be successful win-win I / O storage providers in the cloud. Especially HP's 3PAR platform. 3PAR has long been a leader in storage resources for service providers and enterprise applications, and there are some unique business processes currently under Cloud Agile.

Cloud: New Business Battlefield

While it is too early to say who wins this new technology contest, we can be confident that a rapidly growing cloud market will reshuffle the current data storage vendor landscape. The winners in this race will win the market by gaining highly scalable multi-purpose storage by providing accurate business models on an accurate platform.

【Editor's Choice】

Hong Kong data center into an Asian cloud computing hub China lost the first chance? Hot Survey Graphic: Open source software into the main force of cloud computing SQL or NoSQL - Cloud computing environment, the choice of who? Cloud computing as the "Industrial Revolution" as a subversive change to be over security CA 2011 World Expo revealed the focus of cloud computing services in China 【Editor: Xin Wei TEL: (010) 68476606】