2012 Prediction: StorSimple
Cloud Storage Goes Enterprise in 2012
We’ve seen too many CIOs complain that all their savings from server virtualization are getting lost in increasing storage costs due to VM sprawl. This will change soon because solutions that bring the economics of public cloud services to the enterprise data center will go mainstream in 2012. We can expect to see several industry trends drive the development of cloud based storage solutions for managing VM sprawl in the coming year, including:
Enterprise Vendors Offering Low-cost Cloud Storage Services
- Amazon S3 and Windows Azure are the two largest cloud storage services today that are aggressively building out their enterprise cloud sales force.
- Nirvanix offers an excellent cloud storage service and with IBM as the OEM partner it is set to scale in 2012.
- EMC Atmos based clouds will go mainstream with the roll-out of recently released Atmos 2.0 into major cloud service partners like AT&T Synaptic Storage.
- Rackspace Cloud Files was the first Openstack based enterprise cloud and in 2012 we will see HP and Dell release their Openstack based clouds.
- Following on the success of Google Apps, Google too has just launched the Google Cloud Storage service.
Wide Availability of Proven VMware Ready Hybrid Cloud Storage Appliances that Connect These Cloud Storage Services to Enterprise Data Centers
- StorSimple currently has a VMware Ready hybrid cloud storage appliance in 2011, but expect the industry to have more VMware Ready Hybrid Cloud storage offerings in 2012.
- These hybrid cloud storage appliances integrate features like deduplication, capacity-on-demand with thin provisioning to the cloud and integrated cloud-based backup and disaster recovery that reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of storage for VMware by 60-80% versus existing SAN/NAS storage.
Adoption of vSphere 5 with the Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (SDRS) Features
- vSphere 5 SDRS makes it possible to have automated policies to seamlessly use a less expensive VMWare Ready storage solution, such as a hybrid cloud storage appliance, for these non-production VMs.
- Early adopter customers are already using vSphere 5 and cloud storage to offload their data centers and get a handle on their VM storage and data protection requirements.
- VMware released vSphere 5 on Aug 25, 2011 and we are already seeing customers deploying SDRS with cloud storage.
So there you see, we have the perfect alignment for of the stars to tame VM sprawl with integrated enterprise cloud storage in 2012!
