Tag Archives: enterprise strategy

How Businesses Are Using Cloud Storage

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It’s no secret that many organizations have begun to look at public and private clouds as alternatives to traditional IT infrastructure. In January 2012, Enterprise Strategy Group published their 2012 IT Spending Intentions Survey revealing that 28% of organizations surveyed were using cloud computing services as a way to control IT costs, up substantially from 13% in 2009.

Cloud storage is one of the many ways that organizations are leveraging cloud services today. With public and private cloud storage available from a number of well-known providers such as Amazon, AT&T, Nirvanix, RackSpace, Google, HP and OpenStack, and cloud storage gateway technologies enabling instant integration of cloud storage into existing IT storage environments, businesses are examining and/or using cloud storage to augment existing IT infrastructure as an alternative to traditional storage.

With this in mind, let’s take a look beyond the touted cost containment benefits and examine how adopters of cloud storage are actually using it to solve problems.

Data Storage Challenges

Survey participants were asked to identify their top data storage challenges.

Topping the list was disaster recovery, with over 60% of respondents identifying it as a data storage challenge. For many organizations, the purchase of off-site infrastructure for disaster recovery purposes represents a budgetary challenge and is often out of reach. Second up was handling storage growth. With organizations experiencing data growth up to 50% per year and long term retention requirements growing, it is not surprising to see this identified as a top challenge. Closely related to this and tied for third is the category storage upgrade costs, incurred as a result of outgrowing and replacing storage systems on a regular basis. Also tied for third is having a path to cloud storage, implying that many businesses embrace the cloud business model and the opportunity to recognize new cost and administrative efficiencies, but have not quite figured out how to create a seamless path to cloud storage for their specific environments.

Cloud Storage Use Cases

Survey participants were asked to indicate their interest level in cloud storage use cases.

At the top of the list of use cases was off-site backup and archival, followed very closely by disaster recovery. A reasonable deduction based on responses to the prior survey question is that users are in fact looking to the cloud to solve gaps in their backup and disaster recovery strategies. This result shows the strong appeal of using pay-as-you-go infrastructure versus dedicated infrastructure for seldom-used but business-critical functions. Next up are storage tiering and central storage for remote offices. Again, relating back to the responses to the prior survey question, storage tiering to cloud addresses both the storage growth challenge as well as the storage upgrade cost challenge by moving less critical or less frequently accessed data to the cloud, effectively extending the life and capacity of existing storage systems. Central storage for remote offices, on the other hand, addresses the administrative burden of decentralized IT environments where discrete storage systems may reside across multiple sites requiring the traditional life cycle of maintenance, support and replacement. By centralizing storage to the cloud, both storage costs and remote management costs can be reduced drastically.

Is Cloud Storage Moving to the Mainstream?

The survey results indicate cloud storage adoption is indeed making strides. For specific use cases, such as off-site backup and disaster recovery, the resounding answer from users is that cloud is a compelling solution. For other use cases, such as primary storage, the response from users is a mixed with 41% of respondents having no interest in such a solution and 48% of respondents showing some interest. In both cases, results indicate that cloud storage is pushing closer to the mainstream and may soon become an integral part of every IT infrastructure.

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Cloud Computing Is Like An Airplane

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A cloud computing service is like an airliner – even though it can experience devastating crashes that affect many people, like Amazon’s crash last month, it’s still safer than driving your own car … or IT infrastructure.

That’s the rationale provided by Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix, during a panel discussion on cloud computing during a keynote address at Interop 2011. Also on the panel were Randy Rowland, senior vice-president of product development at Terremark; Andy Schroepfer, vice-president of enterprise strategy at Rackspace; and moderator David Berlind, chief content officer at UBM TechWeb.

Berlind began the discussion by reviewing the recent cloud outages and attacks at Amazon – up to three days for some users – and the Sony PlayStation Network, which lasted several days and affected 100 million customers. Berlind also quoted data that found that every one second of latency costs financial trading firms $100 million over a year.

“Is this mission critical?” Berlind asked of the cloud infrastructure in light of these outages. “This is a confidence issue.”

“It’s like an airline crash,” responded Citrix’s Crosby, “but it’s still safer in an airplane than driving to work.”

Crosby then wondered aloud what the cloud or IT equivalent is of the Federal Aviation Administration, the airline industry’s regulator and watchdog. Without waiting for an answer, he continued with his analogy. “Broadly, you’re far better off in the cloud than doing things your own way,” he said.

Outages should be expected in the cloud from time to time, said Rackspace’s Schroepfer. To minimise them, operators should invest in backup, redundancy and resiliency.

“We’ve got to be willing to spend money,” Schroepfer said. “IT does go down.”

Application writers need to fully understand the infrastructure they’re developing programs for, said Terremark’s Rowland. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service allows multiple instances of customer applications to run in so-called Availability Zones within a region; but analysts say it doesn’t provide the necessary tools to load-balance applications between regions, so customers have to use additional software on top of their Amazon instances.

“I don’t feel sorry for the application writer that doesn’t understand the infrastructure they’re writing to,” Rowland said. “They need to understand how it’s built, do their due diligence.”

The panel then suggested customers may want to run applications redundantly in two clouds instead of one. This may increase costs but will still be less expensive than building, owning, operating and maintaining an exclusive infrastructure, they concluded.

“The cost is never equal to internal” IT infrastructures, Crosby said. “You may experience three days of outage but you wouldn’t have existed otherwise.”

Berlind then asked the panel if cloud providers needed to be more transparent in their infrastructure operations and service-level guarantees, and whether those SLAs needed to be more comprehensive and standards improved. The panel concluded that it’s up to the customer and provider to negotiate a contract beforehand that is detailed and airtight.

“They’ve got to develop that relationship, which includes transparency,” Schroepfer said. “Customers have to trust the provider; they’ve got to believe they are fixing (any glitch).”

“The contract defines that relationship,” Rowland concurred.

Crosby then compared the SLA discussion to Apple’s App Store for the iPhone, in which applications are stored and run in the cloud and consumer satisfaction seems to be high. But then he said that environment is very different from cloud-based IT for enterprises.

“Again, what’s the FAA” for enforcing cloud SLAs? Crosby asked.

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