Tag Archive for Cloud

A Roadmap to High-Value Cloud Infrastructure: Data Storage Expansion

April 30, 2013 / / No comments

As discussed in our prior installment, while there is no “one-size fits all” path to cloud infrastructure adoption, a roadmap can ease and simplify the transition to cloud while minimizing IT disruption. More importantly, a phased approach (as shown in the figure below) enables organizations to take advantage of on-demand infrastructure sooner than later, leveraging scalability, cost advantages and rapid deployment capabilities of cloud.

Data storage expansion may be one of the easiest ways to leverage cloud infrastructure, which is why we list it as phase 1 of our roadmap. Besides the simple integration path, storage is a foundational building block of a cloud-based IT strategy – once data is in the cloud, more cloud services can be rolled in. Need another reason to begin with storage? Storage is growing rapidly, with the digital universe set to exceed 40,000 exabytes (40 billion terabytes) by 2020. With a data explosion looming, nearly every organization needs to formulate a plan for dealing with storage capacity sprawl.

For cloud storage “newbies,” integration may not appear very simple. In fact, the object-based APIs of cloud storage do not natively interface to many of today’s applications.

While writing directly to object-based APIs can be a complex undertaking, cloud-integrated storage solutions have made integrating cloud storage into an existing on-premise environments as easy as integrating on-premise SAN or NAS storage, with the performance and security of traditional infrastructure.

Once past the integration hurdle, there are a number of advantages of cloud storage versus on-premise traditional storage. These include:

  • On-demand, unlimited capacity expansion: With cloud storage, organizations never have to worry about running out of storage capacity. Capacity is always available and can be increased or decreased on demand.
  • Pay-as-you-go pricing: Traditional storage purchases occur in 3-5 year cycles, where organizations purchase capacity up-front to last several years. This means capacity is over-purchased and largely underutilized during most of its useful lifetime. Cloud storage changes those dynamics by only charging for capacity used at any given time, eliminating all waste. When you need more storage it’s simply there – easy to obtain, easy to use, easy to access.
  • Reduced floor space: Data storage occupies valuable data center floor space and expands over time to require more. Cloud storage allows organizations to grow capacity while keeping their local storage footprint fixed. Over time, as organizations become more cloud-centric, local storage footprints can also be reduced.
  • Virtually no administration: Maintaining traditional data storage generally requires hundreds if not thousands of yearly operations (see below), ranging from backups to software upgrades to addressing and fixing failures. With cloud storage, all of that maintenance is effectively outsourced to the cloud provider, freeing up staff to address building/maintaining key business applications rather than tending to the bane of infrastructure maintenance.

  • No need to to upgrade, migrate, replace: Traditional storage is sometimes viewed as a gift that keeps on giving — but not in a good way. As mentioned earlier, storage system refreshes happen every 3-5 years. Updating and then migrating and replacing storage infrastructure is an arduous task that introduces significant IT risk and administrative overhead. With cloud storage, the cloud provider does that for you, so the 3-5 year data storage life cycle disappears.

The end result of using the cloud for storage capacity expansion is a much better way to deploy, maintain and scale storage infrastructure. While solving the problem of capacity management and growth is of tremendous value by itself, storage also serves as the foundation of the next phases of our cloud adoption roadmap.

Some of the more profound benefits of the cloud that can be realized are in the areas of disaster recover (DR) and Big Data. Stay tuned for our upcoming installments as we discuss these next phases.

Category: Cloud Storage, cloud-integrated storage / Tags: , , , , , ,

5 Ways Cloud Can Improve Your Business’s Top Line Growth

January 26, 2013 / / No comments

 

While IT vendors typically lead a product pitch with cost benefits, it should be no surprise that cost savings alone don’t always drive IT purchases. For many organizations, revenue growth may represent an even more compelling driver.

Cloud compute and cloud storage have in many circles become synonymous with cost savings and improving an organization’s bottom line. Perhaps a lesser known aspect of the cloud is the ability to help organizations increase their top line revenues.

How exactly does cloud enable you to do this? Let’s examine 5 ways below:

  1. Stand up more IT infrastructure than you could otherwise afford: While this may seem counter-intuitive, successful organizations have the ability rapidly scale  their business based on customer demand, and this often requires a relatively massive IT infrastructure. For example, think about the impact on a little-known website with a great idea that suddenly gets an influx of traffic after a positive New York Times or Wall Street Journal article. Traditional IT infrastructure requires capital and maintenance requirements that may be unfathomable for companies still in the growth phase. Unlike creative financing solutions which only ease the capital expense, cloud eliminates the capital, setup and maintenance burdens, providing on-demand IT infrastructure to help your business grow.
  2. Focus your next hires on growing your business: A 2012 ESG survey showed that up to 72% of IT dollars go to maintaining existing infrastructure. With storage capacities growing at a rapid pace, why continue to add headcount to maintain infrastructure at the same pace? Instead, use cloud storage to minimize IT maintenance, focus existing IT personnel on delivering business-driven initiatives (such as new premium services – see below) and hire strategic talent in marketing and sales to directly increase revenues.
  3. Create new premium services for your clients: Deploying a new service for your clients may involve a development, test and production effort, requiring a significant financial commitment toward infrastructure during the planning stage. With pay-as-you-go cloud, there is far less investment and commitment in going from concept to deployment. Simply start small and as development reaches milestones, continue to add necessary infrastructure on demand. With cloud, you can roll out new services and high-value premium services with a new level of agility your competitors will envy.
  4. Use your data to sell smarter. Often the most powerful data to grow your business is sitting in front of you, but may not be accessible if you don’t have the infrastructure to store and analyze it live. Whether it is customer profile data, purchase patterns or customer usage data, current and historical data may hold the key to growing your business. With cloud, years of data can be online and available for analysis via query engines available on-demand. Harnessing your data via the cloud can drive the right decisions to grow your business.
  5. Recover quickly from outages. Let’s face it, nothing puts a damper on revenues like outages. Prospects and customers alike may lose confidence after a significant amount of downtime and may never return. A recent survey shows respondents using the cloud recover from outages must faster than those who do not. Cloud enables the secondary server and storage infrastructure that can help your business recover quickly from outages. With rapid recovery, your customers may never realize an outage even occurred.

If these potential top-line benefits are meaningful to your organization, consider introducing cloud into your IT strategy. At the same time, you’ll also benefit from the bottom-line cost savings of cloud.

If you already use the cloud, tell us what top- and bottom-line benefits you’re experiencing on Twitter or on our Facebook page.

Category: Cloud Storage / Tags: , , ,

Is Cloud Storage Ready for Liftoff?

January 16, 2013 / / No comments

by Lorita Ba

Every now and then, we at TwinStrata like to take a pulse of the industry. While we have conversations every day with prospective and current customers, partners and industry analysts, it’s good to pop up from those conversations to see what the rest of the world is thinking.

And so TwinStrata’s Cloud Storage Adoption survey was born. You may recall the first iteration of that survey, the results of which we released in June of last year, shortly after the Cloud Computing Expo. We continued to collect survey responses throughout the second half of 2012,  and today we released an update of those findings.

We knew we would be getting a relatively cloud-savvy group – our respondent pool was predisposed toward cloud computing – but we figured that this group would give us some unique insights into the attitudes, experiences and direction of the industry.

So what did we learn?

In June 2012, we found, “5 out of 6 respondents indicated that they were either already using or plan to use cloud storage in some capacity – making it the most widely planned cloud initiative (even more than software as a service).”

Today, that number is 9 out of 10.

A whopping 80% of current cloud storage users claim that they can recover their data in less than 24 hours, with nearly a quarter of cloud storage users estimating instantaneous recovery. Meanwhile a shocking one in six respondents who do not use cloud storage estimated that it would take more than a week to recover their data in the event of a disaster.

More than a week. Can your business sustain that kind of delay?

How long would it take you to recover your data in the event of a disaster?

80% of cloud storage users can recover their data in less than 24 hours in the event of a disaster. One in six respondents who do not currently use cloud storage estimate that it would take more than a week.

Today’s findings demonstrate a critical mass that’s forming around cloud storage. Although other cloud computing technologies like software as a service has experienced greater adoption to date, more and more organizations have recognized that cloud storage delivers a simple, practical and cost-effective solution to problems such as exponentially increasing data growth, disaster recovery and out-of-control costs. Want more proof? 70% of cloud storage users intend to expand their use of cloud storage. It’s clear that the time for cloud storage is now.

There’s a lot more in the report, and you can download a full copy of it here.

We’ll continue to keep the survey open, collect responses and report back on the results.

In the meantime, if you want to find out more about how organizations are using cloud storage to solve the problems cited below, please register for our January 31st webinar, Cloud Storage in Action: Cost Savings, Lower Maintenance and Improved Disaster Recovery.

 

Category: Cloud Storage, cloud-integrated storage / Tags: , , , , ,

Hot Trends in Cloud Data for 2013

December 19, 2012 / / No comments

With the end of the year upon us, the time has come to boldly make ten cloud data predictions for 2013. As anyone who has attempted to forecast the future may attest, predictions that are substantive and hold true are often hard to come by.

To that end, I’ve tried to avoid enumerating the obvious — such as a drop in cloud storage pricing, more public cloud adoption, the possibility that a cloud outage may occur and other events that are pretty much a given for 2013. I’ve also steered clear of the moon shots — such as cloud storage standards gaining broad adoption, on-premise storage infrastructure disappearing entirely, an agreement by major vendors to put an end to “cloud-washing” and other ambitious predictions that are somewhat disconnected from reality.

So without further ado, below are my ten hot cloud data trends for 2013:

  1. Software-defined storage: The storage industry did not really need a new buzzword in 2012, but like it or not, this one will stick. Here’s why: Software-defined storage utilizes software on commodity servers to enable automation and economies of scale. Sound familiar? While the terminology is new, the concept is familiar to those who understand cloud. A recent article by Jerome Lecat provides a good perspective on the need for software-defined storage. The downside? Similar to its cloud storage forebear, we can expect this new buzzword to be abused as the new label “du jour” for many products that don’t quite fit the description.
  2. Data monetization using cloud: 2013 will highlight a key differentiator of cloud storage aside from providing cost and administrative advantages over traditional storage: the ability for organizations to use their data to grow their business. The concept of data monetization is mature and well-understood, but not always easily attainable. With on-demand cloud infrastructure, the logistics of harnessing data to improve business revenues become much simpler. Look for targeted solutions emerging in the coming year.
  3. Managed private clouds: I predict a splintering of the private cloud market into managed private clouds and DIY private clouds. Arguably, one of the most compelling benefits of public cloud storage is the outsourcing of management and maintenance. With many enterprises requiring cloud within their four walls, managed private clouds comply with that requirement while still offering the outsourcing advantage of public cloud. Downside? The cost of entry may be high for smaller enterprises or mid-size organizations.
  4. Turnkey DIY private clouds: For smaller enterprises looking at private cloud storage, wrestling with open source can be an unwieldy option. Companies such as Mirantis, SwiftStack and others have come to the rescue, launching OpenStack-based private clouds that attempt to reduce the burden of building, configuring and maintaining private clouds, offering turnkey utilities and management tools. Improved usability and management will be key to the uptake of DIY private clouds.
  5. Cloud-integrated storage: While it is mostly a matter of terminology, cloud-integrated storage will replace the cloud storage gateway for enabling hybrid storage configurations that span on-premise and in-cloud. In some sense, it is a maturation of the cloud storage gateway industry, recognizing that organizations creating hybrid cloud storage environments still require storage on-premise. Cloud-integrated storage satisfies the local storage need and offers near unlimited capacity in the cloud.
  6. SSD hybrid storage in the cloud: With multiple providers introducing SSD as a tier of storage in cloud compute environments, all-SSD configurations might prevail for high-performance application deployments. However, with more than an order of magnitude price disparity between SSD and rotating media, a hybrid configuration combining both may make more economic sense for optimizing price/performance for the majority of workloads. Expect hybrid SSD to fill a gap until there is true pricing parity between SSD and disk storage.
  7. Disaster recovery as a service in the public cloud (DRaaS): OK, I’ll admit this was a 2012 prediction, but technologies have advanced and the economics of DRaaS are just too attractive to ignore. Although zero down time business continuity is difficult to deliver, solutions using the cloud continue to inch closer to that standard. I predict disaster recovery in the cloud without dedicated infrastructure will finally hit the mainstream in 2013.
  8. Analytics as a service in the public cloud: Although similar to a 2012 prediction, I added “as a service” for 2013. The tools to move data into the cloud are available today. Similarly, the tools to run analytics in the public cloud are also here. What’s missing? Delivering both as an integrated service.
  9. Cloud brokerages: While not expected to hit the mainstream, some aspects of the cloud brokerage will appear in advanced data center operations that demand the choice of one or many cloud providers for specific solutions. Similarly, system integrators and consulting organizations have begun to assist advanced organizations in making cloud provider selections. With cloud-integrated storage supporting multiple simultaneous cloud providers, the foundation is available today for working with a choice of cloud providers based on price, performance, reliability and other attributes.
  10. Flattening of traditional storage infrastructure sales: Given the significant cloud storage adoption in 2012, I predict  a flattening of traditional storage sales by year end next year. With organizations continuing to store archive and unstructured data for compliance, retention and other uses, cloud storage will emerge as a compelling alternative and with predictions of the cloud storage market hitting upwards of $40B by 2018, it’s bound to impact on-premise storage.

So how do you think these predictions will fare in 2013? Is there anything missing? The answers are only 12 months away.

 

Category: Cloud Storage, disaster recovery / Tags: , , , , , ,

A View of Cloud Storage from Cloud Computing Expo

June 28, 2012 / / No comments

Attendees indicate cloud storage as the most widespread cloud initiative

by Lorita Ba

As part of our presence at Cloud Computing Expo in New York two weeks ago, we conducted a survey at our booth (in return from some quite popular storage hogs). More than 100 attendees participated and the results were rather enlightening.

For example:

  • 5 out of 6 respondents indicated that they were either already using or plan to use cloud storage in some capacity – making it the most widely planned cloud initiative (even more than software as a service).
  • Although security was the most frequently cited objection to cloud storage, more than half (58%) of respondents did not indicate any security concerns.
  • 50 percent of small businesses with between 51-250 employees have been using cloud computing for three years or more, making it the most experienced group.

A view of cloud adoption by type, as reported by attendees of Cloud Computing Expo NY, June 2012

Despite the hubbub around disaster recovery, 51% of respondents cited scalability and easy storage provisioning as the greatest value provided by cloud storage. When broken down further, however, we found that 55% of cloud storage users cited disaster recovery as a key benefit, compared to just 28% of all non users. Such a difference suggests that while data protection in support of disaster recovery may not be a primary reason to move to cloud storage, once deployed, it becomes a fairly significant ancillary benefit.

The results in the report demonstrate a clear trajectory: Although cloud storage has not been the most widespread application to date, an increasing number of organizations are turning to cloud storage to help alleviate the pain associated with needing to constantly reprovision new storage.

Download the five-page report to read the rest of the findings.

Category: Cloud Storage / Tags: , , , , , ,

How Cloud Solves the IT Maintenance Dilemma – Part 2

May 22, 2012 / / No comments

In Part 1 of this series, we highlighted Enterprise Strategy Group’s 2012 Spending Intentions Survey, showing that organizations plan to spend 60-72% of IT budget maintaining existing infrastructure in 2012. This second installment takes a deeper look at the maintenance cost of data storage infrastructure and how cloud technologies can help.

Consider the IT burden of maintaining data storage. Regardless of industry, data storage capacities are constantly growing and on-premise storage arrays require upgrade and replacement on a regular basis. This results in a constant stream of maintenance tasks.

Let’s take an example: Assume an organization stores data across 6 separate storage arrays. A typical 3-year life cycle per storage array would mandate at least two migrations/retirements of storage arrays per year in addition to two new storage array purchases. And remember, each time a storage array purchase is required, there’s a qualification process that precedes the purchase. Also, if each storage array requires three software upgrades per year, 18 total upgrades would need to be orchestrated annually in a way that minimizes business risk. Let’s not forget that hardware and network failures, which may not cause outages thanks to RAID-protection and redundancy, also require manual intervention and repair.

The maintenance burden increases further when you add multiple provisioning operations every week and daily tape backups that may include coordination of tape transport off-premise. Finally, consider the unplanned restore operation from data loss, viruses or other unforeseen events. Below is a chart that illustrates some typical storage maintenance tasks and their frequency on an annual basis from the scenario described above:

Can using cloud storage help reduce the maintenance burden? The answer is yes. However, while it may seem ideal to move all storage to the cloud, that may not always be practical. A good starting point is the growing data stored by many organizations which is infrequently accessed and is often retained online for compliance purposes or for internal retention. Why store all of that data on-premise and use IT personnel to maintain it? Instead, consider moving less frequently accessed data to the cloud. Moving a portion of storage infrastructure to the cloud reduces the administrative burden proportionally across all of the aforementioned operations. At the same time, it may entirely eliminate the need for off-site tape backup and/or off-site storage management.

Thanks to cloud storage gateways like CloudArray, storing data to a choice of cloud storage providers is as easy and secure as storing data locally. Storage gateways can reside alongside existing storage infrastructure and offer tiers of storage in the cloud that require virtually no administration, maintenance or replacement. In fact, the majority of storage maintenance operations in the chart above are drastically reduced. With software or hardware form factors to choose from, gateways have a very small on-premise footprint but can expand in capacity well past the largest storage arrays available today, without the constant need for upgrades.

If your business is currently spending too much of its IT budget and time on maintenance, consider using the cloud. It offers your IT staff a new level of freedom to help build value for your business.

Category: Cloud Storage / Tags: , , ,

How Cloud Solves the IT Maintenance Dilemma – Part 1

May 13, 2012 / / No comments

It’s only natural that most organizations split their IT budget between new technology to enhance business operations and maintenance of their existing infrastructure. Although the actual split varies across organizations, it is striking how high the typical percentage of budget allocated to IT maintenance is. According to Enterprise Strategy Group’s 2012 Spending Intentions Survey, organizations plan to spend a whopping 60-72% of IT budget maintaining existing infrastructure in 2012. Within that ESG survey group, the highest percentage represents organizations with decreasing IT budgets while the lowest percentage represents organizations with increasing IT budgets. See the results in the clickable chart below:

A simple explanation for the “maintenance-heavy” budget split may be that most organizations accumulate more and more infrastructure over time. Much of the infrastructure houses data, a result of ever increasing demands for storage capacity.

For businesses focused on enhancing their customer offerings and experience, having the vast majority of their IT budgets spent outside of their primary focus is problematic.  Put simply, if creating value for customers is the primary businesses objective, the best use of IT resources is not infrastructure maintenance.

So does the availability of cloud shift IT budget allocations away from maintenance toward new technologies?  While cloud doesn’t necessarily make the cost of maintenance disappear, it can free up IT staff to focus on new technologies that deliver the operational enhancements that businesses are seeking.

In Part 2 of this series, we will examine how cloud addresses the maintenance dilemma for data storage…

Category: Cloud Storage / Tags: , ,
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