Cloud bursting on the horizon
Is storage-as-a-utility finally coming of age?
While enterprises have for decades built their own storage infrastructure, the internet has given rise to a new phenomenon – cloud based storage, whereby storage is delivered as a service via the internet.
Ten years ago, during the heady dotcom days, the concept of storage as a utility was first envisaged. Now these services have finally become available.
Storage systems vendor EMC has been one of the early movers in this market and has made this service available via its Atmos platform – a global multi petabyte network of massive data centres.
“We’re using commodity-based hardware to build internet-based support services such as search and storage, and the likes of media firms, telcos and entertainment companies are starting to use that type of storage provision.
They administer it themselves; the security is built in and it’s provided to them over the internet,” said Gerry Boyce, chief technical officer with EMC Ireland, who added that the system was aimed at unstructured data – files, video clips, spreadsheets and so on – rather than databases and other structured data.
“You’re not going to run your OLTP [database] services over it or anything like that, but unstructured data can easily be provided over the internet.” Boyce noted that such services were being enabled by the move towards virtualised servers and storage.
“In Ireland, only 10 per cent of all the servers were actually virtualised, but every single organisation is looking at how they can move to that,” he said.” So this is going to bring in new models for IT and also cloud-optimised storage – basically buying internet based services from a provider on a price-per-gig per-month basis.”
The problem with cloud computing from an enterprise perspective has always been security – while smaller organisations have embraced the concept because of its cost and management advantages, few large organisations, particularly those in the public sector, would be willing to see their data sit on the servers and storage boxes of a third party.
This has been recognised as a major obstacle to widespread adoption among enterprise customers.
Swan said he believed that private clouds might be the answer and pointed to work being done by Microsoft as part of its global Azure project, which was all about bringing the benefits of cloud computing to the enterprise.
“Azure is very interesting because it promotes the use of private and public clouds. For example, you could have your application running in the cloud, but your data being stored in your own private environment, your own data centre, because of issues relating to compliance.”
Boyce said security was also firmly on the radar of storage vendors, which had started to build encryption into storage devices so that if data was being moved across the corporate San or internet it was fully protected.
“You’ll start to see a lot of those features being built into storage arrays, and with cloud offerings it’s obviously the biggest concern for anyone using them.”
Looking to the future, Boyce said he saw an average corporation’s storage platform being a “federation’‘ of cloud-based storage that could be accessed from anywhere and in-house storage running OLTP systems such as Oracle and SQL.
Dell’s Kevin Swan agreed.” As far as cloud computing is concerned, people will feel confident about storing certain information in the cloud that’s hosted by a different provider but equally they’ll only store certain information on their own internal systems. So they’ll demand that flexibility,” he said.
