2010 Prediction: Cameron Bahar, ParaScale

By Cameron Bahar
published: Thursday, December 03 2009

Enterprise Storage: The Forecast is Cloudy

In 2010, the private cloud storage hype will continue with many vendors slapping a cloud label on a wide variety of solutions and products. The attention on private clouds will be driven by organizations looking to get a handle on the dramatic growth of file-based data to decrease costs and management time, while increasing flexibility.

Organizations have pursued many strategies to cope with their expanding storage requirements and costs. ILM gained favor as leading storage vendors took some of the focus off of their expensive proprietary storage by shifting the spotlight to less expensive storage options. Storage administrators were urged to create policies and move data to less expensive storage platforms. The result has been an increase in management complexity as administrators struggled with limited available metadata (creation date, last access date, size, etc.) to automate the movement of data back and forth across multiple tiers.

In 2010, management and operating costs will figure much more prominently in storage decisions. Maintenance costs on existing gear will be under heavy review with the emergence of commodity-based hardware storage options. Customers will deploy private clouds as a low-cost, self-managing alternative to simplify storage management and decrease costs. Organizations that are investing heavily in new tier 1storage and moving aged data to archive, will experiment with a middle tier that leverages low cost commodity hardware and provides read/write access. 

This middle cloud tier will provide an opportunity for administrators to automate storage management and optimize performance and cost without moving data. This middle tier will also support large scale analysis while eliminating administrative tasks related to data migration. This private cloud tier will also include an integration layer with service provider cloud offerings. The complementary architectures will support “cloud bursting,” the seamless ability for service providers to offer spillover capacity and compute to enterprises.

Another factor driving cloud storage adoption is virtualization. Server virtualization enables the sharing of compute resources across applications and provides the flexibility to easily transport workloads to optimize for performance and cost. With server virtualization, organizations are free to take advantage of low-cost commodity hardware and aren’t tied to proprietary linkage of the OS and the hardware platform.

Look for cloud storage options that virtualize file systems on top of commodity hardware and also enable organizations to take advantage of low-cost commodity hardware in place of proprietary storage solutions. Of course, not all cloud storage offerings provide this capability. For most organizations that are pursuing cloud strategies, the ability to create an on premise cloud as a complement to, or in lieu of a hosted option is a big plus.

In 2010 service providers will expand cloud storage offerings for enterprises providing additional hosted options as an alternative or as a complement to on premise private clouds. Hosted cloud storage solutions provide a much needed storage alternative for consumers, SMBs and enterprise customers. To further drive efficiencies, cost savings and management ease of use, service providers will begin executing VMs directly on those cloud storage platforms that support it. Unifying cloud compute and storage infrastructure will also provide a platform for service providers to build new value-added services. The future for service providers rests on their ability to differentiate and provide value added services that expand their margins. 2010 will be critical to start the process of establishing the platform and prioritizing the development of additional services.

2010 will be the year where private cloud storage adoption intensifies as enterprises focus on solutions to help harness extreme data growth, simplify their infrastructure and decrease management time. With cloud storage adoption, organizations will also be increasing their flexibility and establishing a strategic platform for increased business agility. While many cloud solutions tout cost savings, the flexibility of the cloud platform is a key differentiator for enterprises to consider.