14 March 2010
Sunday
Storage management in the Cloud
By Nigel Tozer, EMEA Business Development Director, CommVault | Dec 30, 2009
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PrintAsk a dozen people what their perception of Cloud Storage is and you would probably get a dozen different answers. In short, Cloud storage is a utility-model - also recognized as a pay-as-you-consume - service that provides groups of users or companies access to storage to use as required.
Accessed over standard Internet connections, the storage clouds can expand or retract depending on usage and demand - and so are scalable and flexible.
Public Storage Clouds and Private Storage Clouds create a further element of confusion. Essentially, a Public Cloud is a pay-as-you-go service hosted outside a customer’s firewall and/or premises and is usually provided via a web interface and the customer doesn’t own any of the hardware and software infrastructure.
An example would see customers charged on a per-gigabyte, per-month basis with additional charges for the bandwidth used in sending and receiving data.
The alternative, a Private Cloud, would typically be hosted within a customer’s firewall using hardware and software licensed and owned by that company and all data here would be managed by the internal IT department. The benefits of this model are that the organisation realises the flexibility of scale within the cloud storage model whilst maintaining control and management of their information and data assets.
From a usage point of view, Cloud Storage is best suited to unstructured file data types or data archiving for long term storage requirements. Medical record retention, credit card and mortgage applications would be ideal candidates here, whilst real time or transactional block based data requirements are not appropriate as the latency of the internet would cause noticeable delays and create issues.
Backup and archive applications are also very appropriate uses for the Cloud. If organizations aren’t comfortable relying on the cloud to host primary data assets, they could use Cloud Storage to facilitate the infrastructure required for all backup and long term archival needs.
However, assuming bandwidth and network infrastructure are available, there are still serious considerations to be made by businesses before embracing the Cloud as a facility for backup and storage.
Not least the question of security, especially for industries that face strict regulation. Can a business retain full control? Can it be audited, adhere to legal search and meet the demands of legal hold? At a most basic level, CommVault is already seeing this problem with companies needing to factor in the security issues being raised by corporate users on sites such as Facebook and MySpace. When this results in dismissal proceedings, the difficulty comes in tracking user activity in a space that now extends beyond the corporate network, yet still has a bearing on the daily operations and brand equity of a company.
