Venyu Blog

By Guest Contributor: Jerome Wendt, President & Lead Analyst, DCIG Inc.

More companies than ever are thinking about using “cloud storage” as some part of their data storage strategy. However the difficulty that they can quickly encounter is putting cloud storage into some type of meaningful context. Cloud storage is still in its early stages with only a few vendors actually delivering cloud storage solutions. Despite this relatively low number of cloud storage offerings, it is already available in a number of different forms with each solution having its own particular quirks. These idiosyncrasies can distract users and result in them not substantiating that it delivers on the core features any viable cloud storage solution should possess.

In one sense cloud storage is really nothing new. Early iterations of cloud storage have been available from managed service providers (MSPs) like Venyu (formerly AmeriVault) for years as cloud storage was (and still is) an integral part of what made their online backup service offerings possible.

What has changed is that the link between the application and the cloud storage component that powered it has been permanently broken. Now the backend storage architecture that makes applications like online backup possible is becoming of even greater interest to companies. This interest has grown to the point that cloud storage is available as a separate technology that companies can either build themselves or purchase from a cloud storage provider.

But as cloud storage begins to be adopted, prospective users should verify that any solution they evaluate possess the following five core characteristics so cloud storage can deliver on its promise in whatever context they use it:

• Highly scalable. Scalable means more than just being able to add more storage capacity when needed. A cloud storage solution must also be able to dynamically scale processing power and networking capacity
• Highly available. High availability in a cloud storage solution is often only discussed when an outage occurs. Last year’s headline, “Web Startups Crumble under Amazon S3 Outage”, sums it up well. No matter how scalable the solution is or well-known the company providing the solution is, cloud storage outages of any kind are viewed as totally unacceptable and can easily result in the type of national headlines that no user or cloud storage provider ever wants to see.
• Minimal or no capital investment. One of the attractive features of cloud storage is that organizations can move into a cloud storage solution with minimal or no capital investment. However that is primarily true with public cloud offerings (cloud storage purchased from a third party) as opposed to a private cloud offering. Private clouds have the other features commonly found in cloud storage solution but they usually require companies to make an upfront investment in a storage infrastructure.
• Little or no maintenance. Cloud storage eliminates many of the normal management hassles associated with managing storage from initially provisioning storage capacity to applications to auto growing volumes or file systems so out-of-space conditions do not occur. Further, the underlying architecture of cloud storage consists of processing, networking and storage components that can be easily fixed, repaired or upgraded without any outages.
• Dynamic storage tiering. As organizations host more applications on cloud storage solutions, these applications will need different tiers of storage. Some applications will require high performance storage such as Solid State Disk (SSD) that costs more while others will need large amounts of lower, cost, high capacity storage such as Serial ATA (SATA).  The cloud storage solution should provide some policy based mechanism to dynamically and non-disruptively place data on the appropriate tier of storage.

These are five features that all approaches to cloud storage currently have in common. Even in the case of private clouds that do require an upfront capital investment, private clouds arguably cost less to implement, scale to higher capacity and performance levels and are easier to manage than traditional storage solutions.

Cloud storage is an aspect of storage that every business needs to learn about and be prepared to adopt. While cloud storage is still in its infancy, its upfront low cost, ease of adoption and high availability and scalability make it almost a guarantee that this new storage architecture will find its way into every business one way or another sooner than they may think.