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How Are Virtualization, the Web and the Cloud Affecting Your Storage Purchase Decisions?
As virtual application servers and Web- and cloud-based services proliferate, information storage and delivery requirements are growing and changing rapidly at many companies. And while storage based on "JBOD" ("just a bunch of disks") might have been sufficient in the past, raw capacity alone doesn't really address these emerging and evolving needs adequately. How are your storage investments and deployments evolving, what alternatives are you pursuing or considering, and how are your vendors, resellers and integrators helping, if at all?
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cloud technology will change everything. For the first time managers can invest their time into their products and services and not have to become IT sleuths to figure out what the IT "experts" are talking about. We are a medium sized business 1000+ employee in 42 countries. Many of the countries that we operate have some very basic IT infrastructure and a big shift to the cloud is largely responsible for our success. Over the last three years we have shifted our entire systems onto the cloud , drastically slashed our IT budget, reduced IT headcount, improved our operations staff's productivity by at least 75% and are grinding down the competition who are still holding on to "legacy" systems and pouring good money after bad.
There are two distinct cloud strategies that are forming for data centers today. The first is external cloud technologies (think Google Apps and Microsoft Azure) in which infrastructure components are hosted. A company can then contract capacity in the hosted cloud, including storage services, and hopefully avoid storage purchases for the data center.
The second is data center cloud technologies geared at speeding the provisioning and easing the overal management of the virtualized storage, server, workstation, and network solutions that may already exist at the data center. In our case, we are using SAN, NAS, and virtual tape solutions for virtualized storage, VDI for virtualized desktops, VLANs for virtualized networks, and hypervisors for virtualized servers.
So which cloud technology do we use? None! Use of external cloud services from the Google-Microsoft crowd have proven unreliable and simply cannot perform at the level we require for the 300 TB of data we work with on-line daily. And, as an SMB, the use of data center cloud technologies as a layer on top of existing virtualization technologies is too costly to justify any ROI.
From a storage point of view, we remain focused on utilizing the proper mix of SAN, NAS, and virtual tape technologies as wll as legal-storage vaulting technologies. KEY: We established a high-level strategy for tiering our storage based on storage operationallevel agreements, "waterfalling" storage devices from primary to secondary data centers, and a purchase/refresh model for on-boarding new storage technologies and maintaining existing technologies with respect to overall TCO.
Each SMB will need to determine a viable storage strategy based on performance, reliability, cost, back-up and recovery needs, and legal retention and discovery requirements.
This is view is totally from the Enterprise Customers.
"Cloud Computing" people are talking since 1990. IBM , Google , VMware starting talking again in 2007 & Gartner saw a Big Leap in this & now every one is talking about "Cloud Computing".
One should be very careful about the legal issues, political issues, platform , Architecture, & other factors.
Storage investments will be high looking at the DR, which for any Customer which is MUST.
Technologies like SAN & NAS or Unified Storage will play a role as per the Storage Practices of the Clients in Data Centres.
www.vitualbox.com
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