The clouds open for enterprise storage

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA: New data storage services are emerging in public clouds, which are designed to be used entirely separately to other cloud services, and can handle live working data that is generated by applications running on customers’ premises, says analyst firm Ovum.

Because of the economy of scale of cloud computing, these services have the potential to cut enterprise IT costs, and become part of the IT landscape.

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“Not only do they relieve the burden of storing data on customers’ premises, but they also have the multiplying effect of transferring to the cloud provider the responsibility of backing-up that data”, comments Timothy Stammers, senior analyst, Ovum.

During the last decade, many start-ups attempted to establish themselves as online storage service providers (SSPs). Considerable investments were made in these companies, and industry observers predicted that they would thrive. But the opposite happened, and the SSP movement collapsed within a few years.

One of the major reasons for the movement’s failure was that the services were not significantly cheaper than customers’ in-house storage, because SSPs were using the same enterprise storage systems as their customers.

“Unable to offer major cost savings to enterprises, the SSPs could not get past hurdles such as the cost of network bandwidth, and customers’ unfamiliarity with the concept of public cloud computing”, added Stammers.

Since then the price of network bandwidth has plummeted, and finding the best way to use cloud computing services has become a top priority for all CIOs. Just as importantly, cloud service providers have begun using a new generation of storage technology, which stores very large volumes of data at far lower cost than conventional enterprise storage systems.

“Many of these providers are not even operating these storage systems themselves, but are accessing giant storage clouds such as those run by Amazon, Microsoft or RackSpace, so furthering the economy of scale.” added Stammers.