Enabling Cloud Storage For The Enterprise

By Michael Tomky and M. Tim Jones

As companies rapidly develop new technologies and practices to deliver on the promise of "the cloud," the infrastructure surrounding the cloud architecture needs to evolve quickly to provide options for service and support. Many of the gaps in this infrastructure that have inhibited storage-as-a-service concepts from gaining traction are now being filled by more robust, creative solutions. By targeting these gaps in the cloud infrastructure, emerging technology solutions provide tangible capital and operational cost savings by integrating technology that allows seamless transition to a cloud storage model.

Solutions targeting cloud infrastructure seem to be appearing on every technology company's roadmap, even to the point of old technology being repositioned to take advantage of the buzz created around cloud storage. However, despite offerings from widely disparate companies, they all have one thing in common: they are focused on delivering dynamic scaling and pay-as-you-go acquisition.

Dynamic scaling is the cloud architecture promise of elastic storage capacity on-demand—use what you need only when you need it. Today's storage paradigm is centered on the premise of over-provisioning. Data pools tend to grow at a fairly constant and predictable rate. However, storage hardware cannot be purchased in small increments. When a company begins to run low on storage capacity, it must buy, at significant expense, new arrays that sit largely unused for a period of time, perhaps years, as the data grows to fill the new hardware. This cycle repeats itself over and over, with large chunks of the company's capital being budgeted periodically to increase the available storage pool.