The Clouds Open for Enterprise Storage
Public clouds, such as those run by Amazon and Microsoft, offer data storage services to complement their compute or data processing services. Until recently those storage services were not suitable for use with applications running in customers’ own data centers. However, new services based on public cloud storage are emerging that do not suffer that drawback. Because of their economies of scale, these services have the potential to lighten the heavy burden of on-premise enterprise storage and backup, and to provide alternative mechanisms for disaster recovery and data distribution.
SUMMARY
Impact
Ovum view
Key messages
APPLICATIONS
Latency is the gating factor
The line between archiving and primary storage is blurred
Faster disaster recovery
Data distribution
THIS IS NOT YOUR FATHER’S STORAGE
Scalable storage creates a translation problem
On-premise gateways
Enterprise-friendly with no gateway
RECOMMENDATIONS
Don’t expect worthwhile SLAs
Ask about data protection levels
Ask about security
Do not treat SAS 70 as a security standard
Methodology
