The transformation of enterprise storage with cloud storage services

Storage has been an integral part of information technology from its inception and will continue
to be throughout the cloud computing transformation that is underway. That’s because all the data we create, use, and share has to be stored somewhere if it is to havemore than fleeting value. A lot of this data is stored in corporate data centers, but a rapidlygrowing percentage is being stored in the cloud.

Enterprise storage architectures will need to adapt to this reality and integrate with cloud storage. Just as cloud services have changed the ways we consume data, they will also change how we store, manage, and protect it. It is short-sighted to think of cloud storage merely as big disk drives in the sky when there is so much compute power in the cloud to do interesting things with it. If it is possible to find information needles in data haystacks using data analytics, it is certainly possible to discover new ways to manage all that data more effectively. For example, the implementation of erasure coding in Windows Azure Storage demonstrates how advanced error-correction technology can also be used to effectively manage cloud storage capacity.

But the advancements in enterprise storage won’t all be cloud-resident. In fact, many of the most important changes will occur in on-premises storage management functions that take advantage of hybrid cloud designs. The section “Change the architecture and change the function,” later in this chapter, examines how extending traditional storage architectures with the addition of cloud storage services makes familiar storage management functions much more powerful.

Source of Information : Rethinking Enterprise Storage