Cloud on the horizon

Storage in the Cloud
For all potential users, cloud-based storage is a particular business concern, especially as it fundamentally places intellectual property under the control of a third party. The secret of the success of the cloud will therefore hinge on how a customer’s data is managed which in turn makes storage and associated protocols a crucial element for consideration.

As a starting point a business should always look to apply cloud concepts internally. In other words, begin by building an internal, dynamic compute infrastructure, with a shared architecture, one that is capable of working to allocate storage resources, depending on the application and service level requested.

The type of network in place shouldn’t however matter to the storage product. Whilst there will no doubt be a debate about how to best interconnect to your cloud internally, your chosen storage platform shouldn’t dictate the policy that you need to adopt. Focus on vendors that have a NAS, SAN, iSCSI and, soon, FCoE offering on their storage platforms. Otherwise, you may risk finding in the future that your decision doesn’t fit in the foreseeable future.
Where your data is stored doesn’t matter, what is important is the class of service you provision for the applications that run alongside it. But, you must address the issue of scalability, by being able to add control units (what we at Pillar call Slammers) and Storage Elements of any class as required.

Having agreed that where in the storage cloud your data resides is not critical, it is however important to understand that the array prioritises data for the best fit to the expectations of performance, or function, of the application. With the Pillar Axiom we are able to deliver this flexibility as system resources can be dynamically re-balanced to allow changing requirements through the API, instantaneously and/or over time. Moving data around inside the storage cloud also does not affect other applications within the

Cloud as the hardware uses its own resource manager to change storage classes (move data), adjust cache assignment and algorithms, update processor power and minimise & manage contention.

Game changing
To truly embrace the opportunities the cloud represents you need to get your future plans for document and data storage just right; and this will be achieved through the provision of the best ‘cloud’ storage architecture. Then the evolution really will be game-changing.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter what the final definition of cloud is that we as an industry eventually all agree upon; what does need to be addressed however is that many are missing the important points of the cloud in the longer term: flexibility, agility and virtualised environments.