Niche Clouds

Every IT vendor of different hues has got a place in the cloud. And if we
look at 2009, it can well be termed as the year of the cloud. Such is the
ubiquitous nature of the cloud, which has successfully shrugged its hype, and is
increasingly becoming realistic. The best thing about the cloud is enterprises
of varying sizes can benefit from the cloud based services. The on demand SaaS
model took IT apps delivery to a whole new level, and unbundled apps from a
traditional in premise environment. While SaaS is one cloud app, it was meant
predominantly for SMBs which do not want to accrue IT assets; cloud computing
empowers enterprises to leverage the full power of the Internet, and create a
true service environment that can be delivered and accessed enterprise wide.

Today if we look at what can be delivered via the cloud, it can be a broad
range of services cutting across SaaS, PaaS, managed services, and even things
like storage can be delivered through the cloud. While Cloud is still a generic
name; and the emergence of specialized cloud based services is seen as the hot
territory, where the enterprises can opt in for a service provider offering
those specialized services. One such specialized service is the enterprise
storage cloud.

Enterprise Storage Cloud

Clearly the market forces will determine the cloud offerings, and at the
heart of the cloud is its elasticity that forms the key to scalability of IT
resources. So players offering more services agility will be able to influence
the enterprise IT decision makers in selling storage clouds. If we look at
this specialized emerging frontier on the cloud, storage cloud in the recent
times is generating quite a lot of interest. So what really is a storage cloud?
The simple logical answer would bea data server connected with the Internet;
and the enterprise will subscribe to a range of cloud storage services; data is
sent to the cloud for storage; and data retrieval happens through the web
interface. The concept of storage cloud takes the storage topologies to the next
level by offering storage as services, and will also enable storage
administrators to manage the cloud. Its on demand, at the same time enterprise
will have control on its virtualized assets stored in the cloud.

Why Storage cloud is generating heightened interest is due to the fact that
over the last many years, enterprises of varying sizes have accrued tons of
unstructured content, emails, applications, images, and a whole lot of data. To
manage this chaos, large enterprises have adopted networked storage and concepts
like ILM et al. But still on an everyday basis, storage is growing, and most of
the enterprises CIOs struggle to manage their storage architectures.

What we are talking about here is the enterprise cloud storage, and hence it
is important to differentiate the consumer cloud storage apps like file sharing.
Enterprise storage cloud is the one that acts as a logical extension to the
in-premise storage topologies, and makes designated storage functions available
as services, and makes it offsite. So the biggest impact it will have on
enterprises is that they can do a better provision of their storage resources by
working on the in-premise and offsite model. Moreover, the availability of
certain services offsite makes for higher business continuity, as the data
stored on the cloud is automatically backed up in mirror servers.

Key Benefits

If we pan the industry landscape, the storage based cloud is aligning on
agile storage clouds, meaning that enterprises can derive a high degree of
flexibility and scalability by adopting the storage cloud strategy. The biggest
benefit of a storage cloud is the judicious use of onsite storage resources.
What it means is a better onsite utilization by moving older data to the cloud,
and freeing up vital space for new applications. However, it is important to
have a well defined storage cloud strategy. With many enterprises having
heterogeneous storage assets, it is hence vital to look at the cloud service
provider, and the kind of platform they provide, and its ability to virtualize
multiple vendors hardware devices. With tiered storage being the norm, when
moving to a cloud based storage regime, enterprises must also look at data
mobility and the service providers ability to manage it through intelligent
storage manager solutions. The bottom line is that CIOs must look at whether the
storage cloud provider can offer a range of services cutting across archiving,
business continuity; and be able to consolidate storage silos.

A typical storage cloud will integrate and virtualize the key storage
elements like disks and controllers, enable capacity planning for scalability,
and reduce the overall TCO and manageability costs. The enterprise storage cloud
brings a lot of benefits and intelligent management features. It is seen as the
next major step in managing diverse storage environments, using either private
or a public cloud. While cloud computing itself is a macro concept, and its
further maturing is manifesting in specialized services such as storage cloud.
Specialized cloud services need a good delivery and a solution ecosystem, and
vendors who have a good solution breadth and delivery will gain most of the
storage cloud business.

From an enterprise perspective, most of the CIOs are looking at cloud very
closely. And the emergence of specialized clouds augurs well for them, because
they are getting a specific service, and it will be easier for them to align
their core requirements with a service they want. The storage cloud is one such
concept in the right direction.

Shrikanth G

shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in