Existing Storage Continues to Be Used

For most companies, the notion of moving all their data to the cloud is not feasible. However, continuously expanding data storage is fueling a need for more capacity. What better way to address this need than with cloud storage? The benefits are access to a secure, limitless pool of storage capacity that never requires upgrade/replacement and reduces capital expense.

Enterprises looking to leverage the economies, efficiencies and scale that cloud providers have achieved are adopting cloud models in-house such as OpenStack for both compute and storage environments. These private clouds offer scale, agility and price/performance typically unmatched by traditional infrastructure solutions and, at the same time, can reside inside a company’s firewall.

Traditionally, companies that need disaster recovery and business continuity have always had to rely on dedicated replicated infrastructure at an off-site location to be able to recover from physical disaster. This means paying capital expenses for often-idle hardware, until the disaster strikes. A DR cloud service means not having to pay for this infrastructure, except when it is needed. Trade-off? While zero-downtime disaster recovery will be unlikely, look for service-level agreements (SLAs) that offer recovery-time objectives (RTOs) in a matter of hours.

What happens to all your data that resides in the cloud trapped by a software as a service (SaaS) application in the case of a disaster? Truth is, most providers do have a disaster recovery strategy, but how can you create an extra level of protection that’s under your control? Look for a new breed of solutions that backup SaaS data either locally or to an alternate provider.

Certain business application can be moved entirely to the cloud, saving the administration and maintenance of their hardware/software platforms on-site. Businesses are looking for tools to make this migration viable, particularly the IT-strapped organizations that can benefit the most. Look for new robust toolsets that can migrate applications to a choice of cloud providers.

NoSQL databases, such as Apache CouchDB, enable great scalability to meet the needs of terabytes and petabytes of data for millions of users. Big data workloads will force many companies to consider these alternatives to traditional databases, and cloud deployment models will simplify the rollout. Look for vendors providing supported NoSQL solutions.

Moving higher-performance applications in the cloud doesn’t always guarantee that they will get the level of performance they need from their data storage. By offering high-performance tiers of storage that are SSD-based (mainly NAND flash), cloud providers will be able to address the needs for predictable and faster application response times.

With data storage still commanding a per-GB operating expense in the cloud, deduplication and compression technologies have become rather ubiqitous in helping minimize costs. While some may argue the capacity optimization game has played out, there is still the challenge of capacity optimization on a more global scale to reduce aggregate capacity usage across multiple tenants. Additionally, there remains a challenge for rich media content, which does not fare particularly well with today’s technologies. Look for the introduction of new data reduction IT that addresses both needs.

Analytics require a scalable compute and storage environment that can be very expensive to build from dedicated hardware (i.e., Oracle’s $1 million Exalogic database machine). Analytics software can also be a rather expensive part of the proposition. Similar to hardware staying idle for disaster recovery purposes, analytics for many businesses may be a seasonal exercise that only runs in short bursts and may not be suited or viable for dedicated environments. Analytics environments in the cloud turn the seasonal expense into a “pay-per-use” bill, meeting business goals at a far lower price point.

??íWhile many companies will adopt clouds in 2012, others may still wait and ponder well past 2012. In all cases, the realization of the economics and efficiencies of the cloud is evident, though the course of action may be different. In response, some of the laggards may find ways to use proven cloud methodologies that improve IT efficiency on-premise or, unfortunately, some may fall prey to cloud-washing by purchasing traditional IT infrastructure with a cloud name in a feeble attempt to satisfy their “cloud-envy.”