In the past year, we’ve seen a massive shift toward the cloud as a viable and trustworthy storage option for many small to medium-sized businesses. As Chris Preimesberger notes in his recent
post that 2008 was “all about capacity and the cloud.”
Meanwhile, Chuck’s Blog is
predicting a new emergence of the “private cloud” which will take the place of the “uber clouds” of Amazon and Microsoft. Not sure why he doesn’t mention Amazon, but obviously their S3 offering is another major entrant to the emerging cloud storage arena.
Parascale CEO Sajai Krishnan, meanwhile, sees both private and public clouds taking off in the coming year. He is quoted in the
Web 2.0 journal as follows: ”The economic downturn and the addition of private cloud solutions to complement public offerings are creating an environment that enables incremental adoption of cloud storage on a very broad scale.”
As we have noted
several times, in order for cloud storage to truly take off, it must include some kind of capacity optimization in order to ensure that the costs remain viable. We definitely continue to make this prediction as the cloud ramps up in 2009.
Optimization includes both compression and content-aware dedupe, and effects both how much it costs to store files in the cloud, as well as optimizations that would make uploading to, and reading from, cloud storage faster over the internet.
Because almost all clouds are based on “forests” of industry standard servers with software to tie them together as a self-healing scalable storage pool, they have the ideal architecture for hosting lots of CPU-intense data reduction algorithms – next-gen object dedupe, and content-aware compressors that work on specific file types. A traditional filer does not have that kind of CPU horsepower – so the cloud is not only a different cheaper place to go rent Terabytes out. It’s also a new green-field architecture on the storage side – whether you are talking Mozy, Nirvanix, Zetta, or Microsoft – with the kind of horsepower to host new fundamental features for cost- and capacity-optimized storage.
About Mike Davis
Mike manages all marketing efforts at Ocarina.
