How does cloud affect the storage infrastructure?
// November 16th, 2011 // No Comments » // Technical Know-It-All
Surely everywhere you venture these days, there is talk about Cloud. A year or two ago, it was limited to the Enterprise, but now it seems that its found its way onto the consumer space as well (eg; iCloud).
I’m not the foremost expert in cloud, but I think everyone’s got a definition for it today. You decide if what I’m saying makes sense.
Is cloud a product?
I don’t think so. Its almost like asking if Internet is something you can buy.
Is cloud a technology?
Hmm… in some ways, but not completely accurate.
My definition is really that Cloud is more of a CONCEPT (for providers) and SERVICE (for users).
Think about it for a second, all you ever hear about cloud is really about a service you can buy or provide. Example being, IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service) and etc. So don’t be completely fooled when vendors trys to sell you Cloud…
I think in-terms of storage, what vendors are really selling would probably be better termed “Cloud-Enabled“.
Features such as thin provisioning, wide striping, data resiliency, storage virtualisation, dynamic tiering and charge backs tools are some of the key features that makes sense to a cloud deployment. How so? I’m not gonna deep dive into the details but hope you will get the drift…
If you ask me, Cloud is just another buzz word in recent times that describes the evolution of the IT industry… Lets take a stroll back memory lane…
1. First there were built-in hard-disks. We realised that utilisation was low, so we built SAN’s for “sharing” storage.
2. We built the PC, but we wanted to communicate with the next PC. So we hooked them up. We realised then, we needed to “share” data with more PC’s, thus we built the LAN, then later the WAN, then the Internet.
3. Servers were great functioning as physical boxes. Again, low utilisation meant that we wanted to “share” to better utilise the resources. Tada… Server virtualisation!
4. Now we have SAN’s, NAS’s and etc. We realise that every vendor talks their own language. EMC doesn’t link with HDS and vice versa. So we have pockets of storage that is not properly utilised. If you don’t already know, this is now happening, and its called Storage Virtualisation, where all storages are consolidated into a single pool regardless of vendor. So we can “share” more efficiently.
5. What’s next on the roadmap? Not too sure if you have heard, FCoE and CEE is around the corner. In a nutshell, that is again, consolidation of SAN and LAN, so the networks can “share” a single common infrastructure.
So, if you look at the 5 points above, the common word amongst them is really sharing (in the enterprise, it’s better known as “cost saving” 
).
Looking at cloud again, we combine all of the above, and again look at the possibility of further reducing costs and/or sharing. And the Cloud is born. Use the existing infrastructure in its entirety and share it out at a higher level.
So when shopping for your next enterprise purchase, be it storage, software or servers, make wise decisions as to how its features can be shared. Do not just take the vendors word for it, cause some just don’t quite make sense.
