Analysis: Problems faced by the service-oriented storage market

Disk storage has become one of the largest sources of expenditure for data centers. The cost of existing arrays is increasing. IDC expects that enterprise storage infrastructure will increase by 300% after 10 years. In this situation, more and more people are worried that companies will fall into the huge cost of storing data.

Entering the cloud SNA storage infrastructure can avoid the difficult situation that IDC envisioned in its "Explosive Data Universe" report. Cloud storage vendors have put forward a large number of proposals for reducing capacity costs, reducing the labor required for storage management and maintenance, and preparing capacity in a timely manner in the most cost-effective manner. Although these solutions have not yet been verified, they have been adopted by various enterprise users. s concern.

For storage industry veterans, cloud storage is not a completely new model. The core concept of cloud storage is derived from IBM's and other vendors' service computing service examples developed in the 1970s, Sun's concept of "network as a computer", and application service providers and storage in the 1990s. service provider.

What is the difference this time? Of course, the economy is different. As the cost of provisioning storage is already high, and the cost of many IT departments is still growing, users are very interested in alternative solutions. Service-oriented storage vendors claim that they can ease the burden of storage management and reduce customer-related costs in hardware upgrades, thereby reducing the total cost of customers. If the cloud provider can achieve economies of scale through the storage capacity pool, then the price of cloud storage will be reduced to a lower level than if the enterprise used its own storage resources.

Previous generations of application and storage service providers also came up with similar ideas, but they have encountered many problems, including the cost of networking between users and application services, customer concerns about sharing infrastructure with other companies, and so on. Once customers begin to demand the use of physical components to provide their services, ASP and SSPs will have to undermine their economies of scale and provide each customer with an infrastructure.

Cloud storage vendors say they have overcome those obstacles. Internet connections are faster, cheaper, and more secure than ever. Enterprise data centers are promoting the use of virtualization technologies to use them to provide users with an independent storage environment, reducing users’ concerns about data security and the need for dedicated infrastructure. The minimum degree.

Cloud storage experts pointed out that companies have incurred high costs for storing data due to business needs or compliance, but they have never received repeated reference from companies. They say that these data are well-suited for storage in cloud storage, freeing up the storage that companies now use to store primary or real-time data. This idea has some value, and is likely to become a curse, that is, the cloud is a cheap storage space for compliance and archival data.

However, providing such services is also a double-edged sword for cloud providers. In order to address the issue of compliance, including the need to comply with different privacy laws in different regions, cloud storage vendors must establish multiple data centers. The operational processes, auditing standards, and certifications of those data centers are all different.